Yoga in Health Care - What is Possible?

Here's two different new articles about Health care - both provide some perspective on our society's choices. I wonder how limited the choices appear to our society at large, since yoga is so poorly offered as a real choice.

In this first article, we see a yoga instructor teaching yoga to Cancer patients. I'm impressed by the apparent intention of the instructor to provide a genuine experience. Here's a quote:

Dr. Maria Jorgensen, an oncologist with Memorial, said healing yoga is not about performing a variety of physical poses.

"It works at more profound levels than the body," she said. "It helps the patients learn techniques to put their minds at rest and not be caught in the emotion of the moment. We have a power of mind over our bodies that we tend to ignore."

Read the whole article, it is a fine example of a yoga instructor and a medical facility working together to serve.

The second article is about a new intervention which won an award at a Wharton business plan competition. The intervention is by NP Solutions, and is about injecting a hydrogel treatment into a disc that is degenerating, focusing on a 20-something marketplace. What caught my attention here is that our society is quite ready to fund this sort of research, but finding the money to fund research into a yogic resolution of this sort of level of chronic pain - even though it will likely cost less, and have other beneficial side effects (unlike the medical intervention) - is much more difficult, given the dynamics of the revenue and profit model associated with yoga practice versus medical intervention.

Here's a link to the article on the Wharton competition. Look for the section on NP Solutions, which starts this way:

NP Solutions: One of the largest potential markets in the world of biotechnology is treating lower back pain, since many people begin to suffer some form of degenerative disc disease in their late 20s, and the vast majority of sufferers are not disabled severely enough for highly invasive and risky treatments, such as spinal fusion.

As a society we have choices, and I believe we have a contribution to make by bringing a yogic perspective to solving these problems of allocating resources for health care.