Nice article in Common Health about yoga in the medical profession. (For law schools providing opportunities for students to practice yoga, click here.) From "Downward-Facing Docs: Med Students Study Yoga To Help Patients, Selves":
As everyone knows, medical students are a singularly stressed-out lot. “More than 20 percent end up with depression, more than half suffer from burnout, and in any given year, as many as 11 percent contemplate suicide,” Dr. Pauline Chen writes in a New York Times report on the “toxic” nature of the medical education process.
So it makes sense to offer these overwhelmed kids de-stressors like yoga and meditation. But here, at the BU medical school’s first-ever yoga elective the aim is even broader: The faculty and instructors who launched the class hope these future doctors will be able to exploit their knowledge of yoga and its research-based benefits to someday help patients and to feel as comfortable prescribing yoga as they do Prozac.
...
The focus is mainly neuroscience, but there’s also psychology, mind-body medicine, anatomy, and
beyond. The class syllabus includes clinical studies on how the nervous system benefits through an elongated exhale, the mechanics of neuroplasticity, increasing heart-rate variability and alleviating lower back pain through postures.
“The unique thing about this class is that the students are getting this extra neuroscience component, so it’s more than just experiential,” says Dr. Rob Saper, the Director of Integrative Medicine at BU School of Medicine ... .
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