Book Review: Yoga as Medicine Ultimate Guide to Yoga Therapy

Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing is clearly a labor of love and the ultimate guide to yoga therapy. This definitive volume was written by the Yoga Journal medical editor, Timothy McCall—a conventionally trained internist and seasoned yogi, who has practiced Iyengar yoga for over a decade. In Yoga as Medicine, McCall introduces the history and science of yoga and translates yoga therapy and India’s ancient medical system Ayurveda into Western medical terms.

The book is centered on yoga therapy as it profiles some of the leading yoga therapy practitioners in different fields of specializaiton. A full twenty chapters focus on leading yoga therapy instructors and include detailed information about their approaches to a wide array of medical conditions, including yoga for arthritis, chronic fatigue, yoga for cancer, infertility, multiple sclerosis, depression, back pain, heart disease, and so on. One of the great features of the book is that it outlines specific yoga asanas recommended by each yoga therapy instructor for specific conditions and gives the reader insight into how to utilize therapeutic yoga (including breathing techniques and meditation) for prevention and healing of illness.

Yoga as Medicine includes sections on how to practice yoga safely, particularly for people with physical limitations, and it guides the reader through steps to finding a yoga therapist and what to expect from a session. McCall describes yoga therapy as “a systematic technology to improve the body, understand the mind, and free the spirit,” and Yoga as Medicinegives you the essential guide to doing so.

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