Yoga as Medicine at the NIH!

In May, the National Institutes of Health, a world center for biomedical research, held its first annual Yoga Week. The week’s events – attended by more than 1300 people -- included free yoga classes, talks by well-known yogis such as Alan Finger and John Schumacher, and by such leading researchers as Dr. Lorenzo Cohen of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Dr. Sat Bir Khalsa of Harvard Medical School. I gave a well-attended (and from what I could tell well-received) lecture on the science of yoga in the auditorium of the NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, MD. Many thanks to the NIH’s Dr. Rachel Permuth-Levine who organized the entire event, and to such corporate sponsors as Weight Watchers who helped underwrite expenses. It is gratifying to see yoga’s role in health and healing beginning to be acknowledged in the bastion of modern scientific medicine. Also of note, the event was not just sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), as you might have suspected but also by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), among others, an indication of just how mainstream yoga and yoga therapy are becoming.

I’ll been teaching more than usual in the next six months. Please consider joining me for workshops in California, Florida, Massachusetts or New York. Highlights include a five-day retreat at the Kripalu Center in western Massachusetts in late August, a weekend workshop at the Yoga Loft in San Francisco in October, and in November Patricia Walden and I will once again be co-teaching an all day intensive on Yoga for Emotional Healing at the Yoga Journal Florida conference. Click here for details on these and other events.

Meanwhile, the book Yoga as Medicine has now gone into its ninth printing (another 10, 000 copies). Translations are in the works for editions in Arabic, Italian, Korean, Russian and Spanish, with more being contemplated. Reviewers have called it “a landmark book,” “an instant classic,” “indispensable,” “a Godsend,” and “the current Bible of therapeutic yoga.”

For a brief description of the book, and to read some of the reviews, click here.

Click here to read the Introduction to Yoga as Medicine.

Click here to see the Table of Contents, including a description of each of the chapters, and biographies of the teachers whose work is featured in Yoga as Medicine, including Patricia Walden, John Friend, Gary Kraftsow, Rodney Yee, Shanti Shanti Kaur Khalsa, and Nischala Joy Devi.

Click here to read an excerpt from Yoga as Medicine’s chapter on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome that appeared in the August/September 2007 issue of Yoga Journal. Please note, to see the photos, you’ll need to either look at the book or the print edition of the magazine.

In September, Timothy gave the opening Keynote Address at Yoga Journal’s annual conference in Estes Park, Colorado. To listen to the talk, or other audio from the conference, click here. Timothy’s keynote describes his journey of exploration into the therapeutic aspects of yoga and yoga therapy, including several trips to India, and describes his efforts to reconcile western science with yogic wisdom.

Click here to find links to the teachers and other experts featured in Yoga as Medicine.

Click these links to buy Yoga as Medicine from Amazon.com, Powell’s Book, or directly from Random House (the Random House site also allows you to browse and search the book). To find a local independent bookstore, click here.

“I knew this was a keeper when I caught my mother devouring it during a recent visit home. Usually resistant to my yogic prescriptions, she must have picked up the book after I had inadvertently left it on her desk. When I commented on her reading it, she said, “I’m finally starting to believe that yoga can help everyone.” Aimed to be accessible to everyone, Yoga as Medicine succeeds in laying out how the ancient practices of yoga can be applied today – complementing, rather than competing with, conventional medicine. Author Timothy McCall, MD, practicing yogi and Western-trained physician, is just the man to deliver these no-nonsense goods. Twenty chapters showcase how leading yoga instructors such as Rodney Yee, John Friend, and Richard Freeman work with students who have conditions such as infertility, insomnia, obesity, and cancer. This encyclopedic tome is sure to become a well-used staple on every yogi’s bookshelf. Readable, unpretentiously smart, and thorough, here’s a book that may even turn your mother on to yoga.”

Sara Avant Stover, Fit Yoga, October 2007, p. 42