Yoga, Science, and Healthcare with Lara Benusis
Yogaland Podcast
Andrea Ferretti
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2019
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
* Her advice for yoga teachers who are interested in working within healthcare
Show notes: http://jasonyoga.com/podcast/episode63
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone I'm Andrea Ferretti and this is episode 163 of Yoga Land. |
| 0:08.8 | Today my guest is Laura Bonusis. |
| 0:10.9 | Laura is a career yoga teacher. She's been teaching in the New York City |
| 0:14.7 | area since the 1990s. She's also a yoga therapist and has been teaching in the |
| 0:19.1 | health care space for a long time. So she was the first full-time yoga teacher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and she developed |
| 0:26.2 | their in-hospital and outpatient wellness offerings. |
| 0:29.7 | Laura is currently on the PhD track at Columbia University studying |
| 0:33.2 | Applied Physiology and her focus is on exploring the efficacy and |
| 0:37.3 | mechanisms of exercise and yoga on the survivorship of cancer. |
| 0:42.1 | So I was really excited to pick her brain and learn about |
| 0:45.4 | what is happening right now as yoga continues to intersect more with Western |
| 0:52.0 | medicine and gain more acceptance. |
| 0:53.8 | And it is complicated. |
| 0:56.5 | One of the things that we talked about before I hit record |
| 0:59.2 | was the very real challenge of trying to define yoga in a scientific setting. |
| 1:05.8 | So one example that she shared with me is that the World Health Organization is very clearly |
| 1:11.8 | defining yoga as a form of exercise. |
| 1:14.8 | And in a sense, that makes sense because there's definitely energy expenditure when you do |
| 1:19.8 | Ossina. |
| 1:21.2 | But obviously that's not the whole picture of what makes yoga effective and how it works. |
| 1:28.2 | So on the other side of things the National Institute of Health is defining it more as an |
| 1:33.8 | embodied practice like Chigong or Tai Chi and they are taking into account the mind-body |
... |
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