Courtesy - Daily Mirror By Yogacharya Arun Kumar
In the Reader’s Digest family guide to Alternative Medicine more than 140 therapies, remedies and self help treatments from acupressure to Zen meditation have been mentioned including yoga. It states that in the last few years yoga has begun to be used more and more as a therapy to help in the management of particular ailments especially of stress and stress-related problems. Because it works on body and mind - yoga is recommended for the relief of conditions such as heart disease and asthma which are amongst other ailments that respond to yoga therapy.
In 1983 a yoga biomedical group in Britain conducted a poll of 2700 people who practised yoga and were suffering from one or more of 20 different ailments. For each condition over 70 per cent of those polled said that yoga had helped them to improve.The World Health Organization has dedicated a full chapter on yoga in its book Traditional Medicine in Asia published by its Regional Office for Asia and fully recognizes yoga as a complementary and alternate medicine.
Considerable research has been conducted on the ability of yoga to improve various disorders of the cardiovascular system which is a major health problem the world over. Blood pressure and heart rate can both be lowered by the simplest scientifically proven asana - shavasana. Yoga improves cardiovascular efficiency and the relaxation techniques of yoga are known to have a significantly beneficial impact on weight control blood pressure and high blood sugar levels.
