Scientists and healers enjoy certain “rights of access”: We can enter our patients’ personal space, ask intimate questions, and give advice that, subject to the sacred sieve of scientific skepticism, is generally taken seriously. Our rights are earned through a combination of aptitude, study, and personal trust.
But scientists and healers only exist within the complex matrix of their society, and along with their rights come certain responsibilities. Among those responsibilities are impartial seeking and sharing of the truth, articulately and intelligibly responding to problems, questioning what is seen as unwise practice or false belief, and selfless giving of help when and where it is needed. Yet national security and commercial confidentiality often require that scientists not share all information. Healers also have legally delimited confidentiality and may choose not to vitiate their gift by disseminating what is, by necessity, only part of the story. This censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, is consistent with the society-wide duty to share what one knows only if the sharing and use of the knowledge are equally discreet. Please use the information herein with humble awareness of the vast present and future human experience of which it forms a very small part.
In the healing arts a commitment to open communication must be tempered by caution. On the societal level, just as with individuals, scientists and healers have a responsibility to “do no harm.” Here yoga therapy leads the way. The flow and structure of what is known about yoga survives only through mutual trust, as much among those who want to know as those who know already. Being passed on from individual to individual, it nevertheless has societal aims: peace and thoughtfulness. The morality is part of the message.
There is another general problem that yoga therapy resolves rather gracefully: All the healing arts must synthesize abstract and anonymous laws of biology to accommodate individuals’ needs and vulnerabilities. If we just adhere to the general laws of science, individual uniqueness falls out of the equation. But if we only attend to an individual’s circumstances, treatment is merely anecdotal, and the vast legacy of scientific fact is ignored. Healers are able to heal when patients trust them to adjust and apply objective laws to the advantage of the individual’s particular case. This trust is what makes medical science practical and most healing possible. Yogis have been earning this trust for thousands of years.
We hope that yoga will appeal to people of all ages; we know that osteoporosis is most effectively countered in the teens and early twenties! But we expect that many people reading these words will be older, and then another consideration is relevant: the fragility of the bones, joints, and sinews. As you get beyond age 50, some experts look at the facts about mechanoreception and urge “impact” exercise to “stave off bone loss.” Unfortunately, another group of experts, with just as much empirical support, caution that impact exercise, such as jogging, can lead rather directly to osteoarthritis.
This puts older people in an impossible position: If they exercise with impact, the bones may stay strong, but the joints at either end will become painful and difficult to move. On the other hand, if they stay away from impact, they will save their joints, but the bones themselves may deteriorate. It’s both ends against the middle.
We believe yoga is the answer for older people who want to stay strong, flexible, and pain-free: In yoga the joints are moved to an ever-expanding range, circulating their fluid and stimulating renewal of cartilage, tendons, and ligaments.1 Simultaneously, the bones are isometrically subjected to forces many times those of gravity, exactly the same forces involved in impact exercise. But in yoga, the forces are applied without any impact—yoga provides an excellent solution to the twin perils of osteoarthritis and osteoporosis.