Benefits of Yoga for Lupus - Guest Post
I did a guest post on the lupus blog, Despite Lupus. Called 10 Benefits of Yoga for People with Chronic Illness, it focuses on yoga for lupus especially. Being a lupus patient myself, yoga for lupus is a subject very close to my heart.
Here’s an excerpt:
“There are over 20 million people in the US now practicing yoga. That’s almost 10% of the population. You might be in the other 90%. That 90% is made up of people who have some vague idea that yoga might be good, who’ve maybe read an article or talked to someone, as well as people who think yoga is a waste of time unless you’re a dancer and it’s all woo woo anyway.
I’m the Program Director for Yoga for Arthritis which is an evidence based training program for yoga teachers to help people with rheumatic diseases in yoga classes. In the spirit of evidence based, I wanted to give you a checklist of the potential benefits of yoga to people with lupus.
Notice I already rolled out potential. The impacts of yoga have not been studied on lupus patients. When I say yoga reduces pain, it’s been shown to reduce pain but not specifically in lupus patients, just in the general population or people with a similar condition. Until there are studies on how yoga impacts lupus, we have to infer. So please keep in mind the limitations of the evidence as well as the strength of common sense…”
Read the rest of the post on yoga for lupus on the Despite Lupus blog, HERE.
I’ve followed Sara Gorman’s blog for years so I’m super excited to get to contribute. Yoga for lupus is an area that has very little research(see below) and very little attention paid to it, so I’m happy to contribute.
This is actually a two part series - the next one focuses on how to choose a yoga class that’s right for you and your health needs. You can read the second part in the series HERE.
Get more tips on how to thrive with yoga in spite of a chronic illness, like lupus in my free ebook, Thrive with Yoga
One research paper - The role and effect of complementary and alternative medicine in systemic lupus erythematosus