This week, I’m talking to Lara Benusis, a longtime yoga teacher and yoga therapist who has taught yoga in a healthcare setting for years. (She was the first full-time yoga teacher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.) She’s also on the PhD track at Columbia University studying applied physiology. Her focus is exploring the efficacy and mechanisms of exercise and yoga on the survivorship of cancer. Lara is a wealth of knowledge and a critical thinker. I love what he has to say about yoga research and her ideas for how yoga can be better integrated into the healthcare system.
Some of the things we talk about are:
- Why it’s important to study yoga from a scientific perspective, the challenges of defining yoga in a clinical setting, and the challenges of using human research subjects in studies
- The research pyramid – and why some types of research or more reliable than others
- What she thinks of Yo science and how to separate the good, research-backed data from unsubstantiated claims
- How her role as a researcher has changed her approach to teaching yoga
- Advice for yoga teachers who are interested in working within healthcare
RECOMMENDED AND RELATED LINKS
Hierarchy of Scientific Evidence Pyramid
Episode 160: The Science of Stretching (and Strength) with Jules Mitchell
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