Doctors learning stress relief techniques?
With stress as prevalent as it is in our culture, it’s important that all kinds of stress relief techniques be offered by doctors.
This program gives medical students who are notoriously overwhelmed and stressed, a chance to experience yoga as a stress relief technique. Not only are they learning yoga but they are also learning about the neuroscience research that supports its efficacy as a stress relief technique.
Apparently this is a trend spreading to medical schools across the country.
I wholeheartedly applaud this development.
Here’s an excerpt…
Then everyone took a deep breath and stretched into downward-facing dog. The yoga part of the medical school’s weekly yoga course had begun.
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.
So in these weekly, hour-and-forty-five minute classes, lead instructor Heather Mason — who designed the course — and members of the BU faculty introduce students to the research behind various elements of yoga.
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.
“Many of these schools incorporate into their curriculum an experiential approach, in which students actually participate in some type of “alternative” therapy — yoga, meditation, acupuncture for example — and then also learn about the evidence for and against effectiveness for these therapies as well as the clinical situations in which they tend to be used,” Kligler says. But naysayers remain. “There are still conservative pockets out there,” Kligler says. “People who feel there isn’t enough evidence yet for us to incorporate some of these alternative practices into the medical school curriculum. But one counter argument is, if patients are doing it, it’s something doctors should know about.”
Read the full article: Downward-Facing Docs: Med Students Study Yoga To Help Patients, Selves
