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In a comment to one of the answers of Is there any scientific evidence that prayer can help to heal? Konerak wrote:

That's for intercessory prayer. Praying for yourself has been correlated to increased healing, but no more than meditation or yoga.

I'm curious if it has even been established that yoga hasa so-called "healing effect" where it can be advocated as being superior to other light-exercises like taking a walk? I am assuming that a healing effect has the same definition as in the above-mentioned question.

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Kit Sunde
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    I’m not happy with equating yoga – even indirectly – with praying. It’s true that the original purpose of yoga was to aid meditation but most “western” practices of yoga don’t include prayer, and many don’t even include meditation (unless you count shavasana as meditation). /EDIT: I may actually have misunderstood the question. – Konrad Rudolph Apr 05 '11 at 11:31
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    Also see https://www.vox.com/2015/7/22/9012075/yoga-health-benefits-exercise-science – Miheer Jul 02 '17 at 20:46
  • @KonradRudolph - My health club is run by uber-Christians. They make the yoga classes call themselves something like "Gentle Flow" and "Power Stretch" and to not make any references to spiritual or inner energy. By the same token, they won't rent facilities to any martial art that has any kind of roots in far Eastern philosophies or that make reference to channeling actual inner energies. Certainly, people do look to or go out of their way to make that connection. – PoloHoleSet Oct 26 '17 at 18:33

3 Answers3

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According to the Cochrane collaboration:

Carpal Tunnel

Yoga is successful, short term, for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome:

Current evidence shows significant short-term benefit from oral steroids, splinting, ultrasound, yoga and carpal bone mobilisation.
—source

This is in line with more general findings that there pain reduction can be induced via meditation.

Schizophrenia

Yoga is better than regular exercise for schizophrenia patients, but not better than standard or non standard care

One trial compared exercise with yoga and found that yoga had a better outcome for mental state.
—source 1 source 2 source 3

Depression

However, yoga had merely "potentially beneficial effects" on depression:

Overall, the initial indications are of potentially beneficial effects of yoga interventions on depressive disorders. Variation in interventions, severity and reporting of trial methodology suggests that the findings must be interpreted with caution.
—source

Anxiety disorder

Yoga is just as effective as other relaxation/meditation techniques:

Yoga did not show significant effectiveness in treating obsessive-compulsive disorders compared with Relaxation/Meditation.
—source

Epilepsy

Finally, yoga is not demonstrably effective on epilepsy:

No reliable conclusions can be drawn regarding the efficacy of yoga as a treatment for epilepsy.
—source

Sklivvz
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    all these studies have their biases : http://nirmukta.com/2015/06/19/no-yoga-does-not-cure-any-disease/ – skept101 Jul 09 '15 at 04:31
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    The article you linked above seems to come from a very unreliable source itself. – hashbrown Sep 27 '15 at 13:19
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    When I click the source links, I am instantly redirected to a generic "Our Evidence" page. http://www.cochrane.org/evidence – BobTheAverage Apr 23 '18 at 22:03
  • @BobTheAverage fixed – Sklivvz May 04 '18 at 14:46
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    What exactly do you mean by yoga? It is a highly variable activity. Analysis is also confounded by lack of definition, not a priori specifying endpoints, arbitrary subgroup division, and a severe reproducibility crisis. Double blind these studies are not! Look, sorry, yoga is no better than rest for just about any pathology you can name. – geoO May 11 '18 at 12:56
  • @geoO are you aware that the Cochrane collaboration promotes and publishes metastudies? This means that these results are the sum of all available scientific knowledge on a subject taking into account reproducibility and study quality. This is also why the generic term "yoga" is used. When you look at other people's studies, you can only use their terms. – Sklivvz May 12 '18 at 07:40
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    @Sklivvz Fully aware, my point exactly. Until "yoga" itself has an accepted definition you can't do a metastudy of "yoga" because you end up combining many different kinds of yoga. A metastudy that includes hot yoga AND a meditative yoga AND a yoga that incorporates ballistic movement. What have you learned from such a study? Which is the beneficial aspect? – geoO May 12 '18 at 12:40
  • @geoO please read the metastudies if you have doubts. They don't make these mistakes. Also read about the Cochrane collaboration: they are *the* authority in terms of metastudies, so I would at least read before judging. – Sklivvz May 13 '18 at 19:07
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    @Sklivvz And re: these metastudies. I read through all the sources you posted. I LIVE on PubMed for crying out loud. I see the somewhat positive conclusions you have cited as not having any quality evidence or reproducibility. Keep up the work though it's important. – geoO May 13 '18 at 23:57
  • @geoO yeah, those are relatively weak, but I wanted to give the claim the best chance (we don't have yet means to disprove) – Sklivvz May 14 '18 at 09:00
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    Meta-analyses are very useful, but they need to be interpreted with an understanding of their shortcomings. Especially for complex interventions (i.e., not a pill), there is information loss about important outcomes, and (because their role is to produce meta-analyses) Cochrane tends to respond to heterogeneity by decreasing the weight of studies responsible for variability in results, rather than looking for a clinically meaningful cause of that variability. In some cases, this has the effect of watering down positive results for complex treatments. – De Novo Sep 18 '18 at 23:27
  • Pooled analysis of an intervention like yoga (or physical therapy, to use a less woo woo sounding therapy), will always show minimal effects, and trials will always have at least a moderate risk of bias (because neither the investigator nor the research subject can be blinded). This doesn't mean they're not effective. It means there's a larger amount of uncertainty. Some of my colleagues prescribe yoga, and I think there's enough evidence to support them. – De Novo Sep 18 '18 at 23:36
  • The purpose of these comments is my attempt to put the meta-analysis results in perspective. For some conditions, they are positive, but a little underwhelming. Because of the structure of the intervention, that's about as good as you'll see from a meta-analysis. – De Novo Sep 18 '18 at 23:39
  • @DeNovo But medicine's standard of care is safe and EFFECTIVE. This must be proven by the claimant. You can't waste a patient's time, money, and dignity barking up the wrong tree. I also can't think of any pathology that doesn't have a more evidence supported treatment or therapy to prescribe. As to your colleagues which "Yoga" do they prescribe exactly? Which Asanas? At what room temperature? And why choose those variables? No particular flavor of Yoga has anything to recommend it specifically, which is the whole problem really. – geoO Dec 11 '18 at 17:08
  • @geoO they have handouts, and at least one OB recommends a specific studio class that uses postures from research protocols. The point of my comments was not to specifically argue for yoga, but to put meta-analysis in context. It is a good and useful form of evidence, not the be all end all of evidence based medicine. It is part of my job to teach young doctors and medical students this, so I thought it might be useful for me to share it here. As an aside, yes, certain forms of yoga have been demonstrated to be safe and effective preventative and active treatments for certain conditions. – De Novo Dec 11 '18 at 18:02
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No

Yoga has been researched for 100 years and researchers have churned out more than 3000 research papers, but none of the studies present any conclusive evidence for the efficacy of yoga in treating any illness. They have not even been successful in standardizing the so called yoga therapy.

According to Verrastro [Verrastro G, 2014], although yoga has been deemed effective for treating conditions from hypertension to epilepsy, many claims are poorly substantiated. Most of these studies are small, short, uncontrolled, non-blinded, with many methodological flaws and high risk of bias. And in most of the studies, details of adverse events and injuries are also not mentioned. Moreover, yoga practices used in the interventions vary markedly, making comparison of results difficult. Interventions have ranged from a single 1-hour session to weekly sessions over several months to inpatient treatment that included many lifestyle modifications. Some studies required subjects to practice physically demanding asanas, while others focused on pranayama or practices similar to guided relaxation.[Verrastro G, 2014]

A bibliometric analysis of the characteristics of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of yoga [Cramer H et al, BMC CAM, 2014] included a total of 366 papers published over forty years, between 1975 and 2014, reporting 312 RCTs from 23 different countries with 22,548 participants. The analysis found that most trials were relatively small in size and failed to explore even common medical conditions frequently. More than 40 different yoga styles were used in the analyzed RCTs; whilst most trials included yoga postures and breathing, yoga meditation and philosophy were less often used (that means, not much of “yoga”). The median study sample size was 59 (range 8–410). Two hundred sixty-four RCTs (84.6%) were conducted with adults, 105 (33.7%) with older adults and 31 (9.9%) with children. Eighty-four RCTs (26.9%) were conducted with healthy participants. Other trials enrolled patients with one of 63 varied medical conditions; the most common being breast cancer (17 RCTs, 5.4%), depression (14 RCTs, 4.5%), asthma (14 RCTs, 4.5%) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (13 RCTs, 4.2%). Whilst 119 RCTs (38.1%) did not define the style of yoga used, 35 RCTs (11.2%) used Hatha yoga and 30 RCTs (9.6%) yoga breathing. The remaining 128 RCTs (41.0%) used 46 varied yoga styles, with a median intervention length of 9 weeks (range 1 day to 1 year). Two hundred and forty-four RCTs (78.2%) used yoga postures, 232 RCTs (74.4%) used breath control, 153 RCTs (49.0%) used meditation and 32 RCTs (10.3%) used philosophy lectures. One hundred and seventy-four RCTs (55.6%) compared yoga with no specific treatment; 21 varied control interventions were used in the remaining RCTs. The authors of this analysis concluded that the available research evidence is sparse for most conditions, and more research is clearly needed. Besides primary research, up-to-date systematic reviews and meta-analyses are needed at least for the most commonly studied conditions in order to evaluate the level of evidence and strength of recommendation for or against the use of yoga in each condition.[Cramer H et al, BMC CAM, 2014]

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skept101
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    "Yoga is being researched since 100 years" - Wrong. Yoga is being researched for last one thousand years (using methods contemporary to those times). Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali – hashbrown Sep 27 '15 at 13:22
  • I've seen the self-serving science sounding yoga "journals." They can't even define the damn thing but insist on advanced statistical meta-analysis. It's a scandal. Yoga is a fun, but ultimately ineffective, activity. Just beats sitting on the couch by a bit. Those who claim otherwise have never proven these claims. – geoO May 11 '18 at 13:00
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One particular yoga method based on Tummo yoga and popularized by Wim Hof has been shown to have nontrivial medical effects, such as the ability to voluntarily influence the autonomous nervous system and the innate immune system. This method involves heavy breathing techniques (to the point of severe hyperventilation) and extreme cold exposure. A scientific explanation of why this method works, is given here (full video here).

Whether modulating the immune system using such methods has useful medical applications is not clear yet. However, the method is very useful in preventing hypothermia when exposed to the cold, and it's also useful to lower the sensation of pain.

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  • The question asks about a healing effect. So no. You know, heroin and marathon running also have "nontrivial medical effects," so what? Are these effects positive, peer reviewed, replicable, and were the endpoints specified in advance? No. I'm sorry, two years later and these yoga "studies" are still a joke and I'm tired of the media and other people invoking awful studies as though it proves anything at all. Yoga is usually mild exercise, depending of type, and if it makes unproven claims for itself it then goes in the trash bin of nonsense right alongside acupuncture and homeopathy. – geoO Jul 13 '20 at 12:41