Research suggests that yoga can relieve a wide array of ailments including back and neck pain, hypertension, arthritis, asthma, cardiovascular disease, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder. Yoga research in the West is embryonic, but it’s booming—with more than 8,000 studies involving yoga listed in the National Library of Medicine’s research database, PubMed. Currently in the United States, more than 1,330 federally and privately supported clinical trials are underway examining yoga’s benefits for a variety of conditions including insomnia, heart failure, pediatric headaches, epilepsy, diabetes, obesity, hot flashes, arthritis, post-traumatic stress disorder and cigarette addiction.
