New research suggests that yoga can be as beneficial as physical therapy in reducing chronic low back pain, according to a study out of Boston.
Both yoga and physical therapy have similar mechanisms in that they work to increase our range of motion and strengthen areas of our bodies that may not always get worked, but this study wanted to see if yoga could potentially be a substitute for targeted PT for chronic low back pain.
“We know that yoga is effective, we know that PT is effective, but we don’t know their comparative effectiveness,” said Robert Saper, director of integrative medicine at Boston Medical Center. “To get a complementary health practice into mainstream health care, I would say that (at minimum) it has to be as effective as the conventional therapy, and perhaps offer other benefits, like cost-effectiveness.”
How Effective Is Yoga For Back Pain?
Due to its obvious cost-effectiveness, researchers wanted to learn just how effective yoga was at treating chronic low back pain compared to physical therapy. They started by getting 320 patients in the Boston area who suffered from chronic low back pain with no obvious anatomic cause. The average pain score from their pain was a 7 out of 10, and nearly 75 percent reported taking pain medications for their discomfort.
Patients were then split into one of three groups:
- Yoga
- Physical Therapy
- Education
The yoga group attended a 75-minute yoga session each week and were given tools to perform some yoga exercises on their own in their home throughout the week. The PT group consisted of 15, hour-long sessions of individualized physical therapy, while the education group received a comprehensive book on back pain. The yoga and PT sessions lasted for 12 weeks, then patients were tracked for a year, with random sessions assigned throughout the year.
At the end of the study, researchers noted that individuals in the yoga and PT groups reported similar levels of function, and both scores were higher than the education group. Individuals in the yoga group also reported high levels of satisfaction with their pain and their progress. Yoga also proved to be a pretty safe option, with only a few patients reporting flare ups of pain during or after a yoga session.
Saper concluded that while the findings were interesting, patients received a highly targeted form of yoga, and individuals with chronic low back pain may not see similar results if they just head to the yoga studio down the street. He hopes to conduct more studies down the road to better understand the best yoga techniques for handling spine pain.