What is yoga therapy? | Kimberly Searl | TEDxToledo

Transcript

so life begins with breath it's the first thing that happens when we come to this world so before I bring some breath to this new idea let's take a breath together so exhale to prepare inhale and exhale the opioid epidemic is costing the United States over a trillion dollars since 2001 and another 500 million is expected to happen over the next three years when we surveyed American adults in 2016 20 percent of them had chronic pain and 8 percent of them had high-impact chronic pain and that was increasing with advancing age now we know that our health care is higher than any other health care any other country and I don't think that's gonna change when 6 out of every 10 Americans is diagnosed with a chronic disease condition such as heart disease or diabetes and we know that depression is the leading cause of disability and ages 15 to 44 now what if I told you that there was an ancient practice that could be low-key relatively low cost was already being field tested in some medical and private sector health care facilities and this ancient practice also could teach some new lifestyle changes perhaps lemonade some of those chronic diseases and maybe over the long haul reduce our healthcare costs our medical model seems to be a fix it and forget it model have you ever wondered when you went to your primary care visits a couple years back and the doctor started saying well I have to ask you some questions are you feeling depressed anxious maybe even suicidal this was an attempt at primary care and behavioral health care to integrate it into one plan I have to wonder are asking a few questions at routine follow-ups and your primary visit is that enough my mentor once said we're all trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again but our institutions and our symptoms seem to be awkwardly interdisciplinary and often not covered by health insurance you know we know the integrative care involves specialists it also makes it individual to that person so we want ahead there but what's happening for that patient is they're seeing am i rid of specialists they're being shuffled around there's being turf wars between modalities there's billing nightmares there's no overarching consensus to the healing process that they're experiencing yeah we have social workers but there's spread so thin they can't keep up so back to that ancient practice that I mentioned a moment ago perhaps that could start to bridge the biomedical community the integrative health community and the patient-centered care yoga therapy can be a framework for this as it is a assessment tool at an application tool the International Association of yoga therapy defines a yoga therapist as the progress that empowers the patient to improve health and well-being through the applications tools and teachings of yoga so yoga isn't a fix-it model it's there to help instill some physical and mental practices so the person can stimulate their own self healing that's also known as eudaimonia in yoga therapy we look at the whole person we listen to what's happening to them we look at them on five aspects the mental body the physical body your vital bodies your subtle bodies your spiritual bodies and our goal in yoga therapy is to increase ease and reduce suffering for that person also to build some resilience with them in the 1970s the biopsychosocial spiritual model was coined by dr. George L Engel it was known as the golden standards to diagnose and to treat disease now currently researchers are thinking that a spiritual dimension needs to be added to this and they like Polanski's definition of spirituality that is to find your significance purpose and meaning through yourself friends community and others and also the sacred through your beliefs your traditions and your values the punch of Maya koushin model that we use in yoga therapy closely overlaps the biopsychosocial spiritual model I think that we can look at ancient science and history and maybe it's suggesting that it's worth looking into this just a little bit more we've seen our medical model go from disease centered care to humanization to patient centered care and that's suggesting that this spiritual dimension is gaining some traction I think yoga therapy can be life-saving even life-changing as it was in my case you see when I was in high school I had a horseback riding accident I fractured my t12 and my coccyx I was in a hospital bed for a year with very limited movement of my left side instead of being on the trajectory to break my high school record in the hundred yard dash the next day I was laying in a hospital bed coming to terms that someone was going to have to help me get dressed use the bathroom and to cut my food as I looked at my body in the mirror I thought this is not me I was not meant to be still well they had me prepped for surgery they decided to take a chance what if we put her in a back breaks I was there for a decade in that back brace and do extension exercises with the bones as the heel pull away from the spinal column what inflammation go down would she regain some usage in that left side as I stood in a mirror willing my toes to move to be able to lift my wrist as high as my shoulders it took every ounce of effort there are many days that I was stuck bent over crying on the floor in despair when I hit my 30s I was in the corporate world sitting a lot it was very painful for me and so when I went to the doctor they prescribed a concoction of painkillers and muscle relaxers the painkillers left me hallucinating and very sick to my stomach the muscle relaxers well they gave me some momentary relief of movement I was so exhausted that I couldn't function and I was socially isolating and again I thought is this really how I want to live my life so instead of hiring another doctor I hired a personal trainer and my husband then gifted me tan yoga sessions now I come from a very conservative rural religious upbringing and the studio I went to is a very traditional yoga studio I walked in and I thought these people are weird and they are odd but you know what my mother taught me to accept a gift with a smile to be gracious and so like a good little girl I used all ten sessions at the end with that consistent practice I was noticing that I had some moments that were pain-free perhaps these odd people were on to something right you know at 40 they predicted that I would need back surgery instead I ran my first half marathon my high school self thank you my high school self could not fathom that decades later I would have a Masters of Science in yoga therapy I would have done an internship at John Hopkins Hospital Howard County General and then I would have a beautiful studio that I see patients in that I get to share my passion that we do have a choice to self-regulate to self heal and I get to pass that on to others and so this leads me to another question could yoga therapy coming in through integrative health care covered by insurance could we then get it out to the masses would that change our population health outcomes I believe it can when we look at disease through a broader perspective we start to treat disease differently we can't treat somebody for one little specific condition and not have it affect all layers of that person right there they aren't separate they're not even overlapping they're integrated because we are multi-dimensional beings in our intrinsic environment and so when we ask these questions would we start to then ask the question how would we educate our health care providers a little differently and I believe that science and ancient history is suggesting that this is worthy it's worthy to look into you know our media gives us a new of epidemic every single day the obesity epidemic the mental health epidemic the opioid epidemic now there's those cigarettes right that every that's on the news right now and people are pointing their finger at the food supply system they're pointing the finger at Big Pharma they're also pointing the finger at health care itself there is an overlapping thing here and I've heard people say that you know all these things that this this rash of epidemics is just another symptom of self-destruction the truth is is that we have to stop looking at the person as they're said condition and start looking at the person with a said condition we have to look at that whole person our policyholders are always looking for innovative ways to cut costs and our national institution of health cites meditation yoga postures and breathing as the most common modalities used in medicine today in 2017 our national pain Congress that makes up over 90 stakeholders and those are federal government agencies such as Medicaid Medicare Department of Defense Veteran Affairs commercial insurance patient privacy advocates II groups and yes agogo therapists they started to look at the how we're going to have this overall consensus to managing the pain crisis and so when you look at this slide do you see the yoga in the side complementary integrative pain management care that is biomedical bio sociological complementary and spiritual care it's a decision-making model that includes the patient's values and goals and they're also looking at the current evidence and clinical support so I want to leave you with a couple things when we look at this broader picture we start to see patterns and I'm hoping that my TED talk today is another puzzle piece in that pattern that I'm contributing to I also want you to look at health care a little bit different we still need doctors to diagnose and to fix we still need therapies to help us with recovery and we need those scientists to keep finding breakthroughs but could you imagine showing up to your health care clinic and having a Goga therapist meet you in the waiting room so rather than your blood pressure going up as you're sitting there perhaps you're doing a meditation and your blood pressure is actually lowering before you get to that room or what if you have a lab work done right and you're waiting and you're kind of nervous about what it's gonna say what if that yoga therapist met you in the room did some breathing techniques so that you could actually be present and hear the results rather than having an out-of-body experience I hear a lot of time clients say they don't spend enough time telling me about the recovery and when I came out of surgery I was really scared I didn't trust my body anymore what if the yoga therapist met you in the recovery room and helped to build safety and security back into your being or maybe you've been diagnosed with a really traumatic disease condition and the treatments that you're being given have a whole host of symptoms and you have comorbidities and you just feel out of control what if the yoga therapist helped you manage that to coordinate with your health care team and to help you feel as though you were still in charge of your own self-healing these are things that we need to start to think about and so I'm gonna leave you with the last question that I'm gonna ask you today what happens if you walked into your health care facility you left with practical tools for your own self-care and could you imagine a new healthcare system because these countries are already starting to thank you [Applause]