mIsTY

Yoga is a powerful tool for healing and maintaining wellness. As the biomedical model moves towards evidence based biopsychosocial strategies for addressing health and wellness care, a growing number of licensed, registered, and chartered healthcare professionals worldwide are using yoga as an effective and valuable approach to help their patients who are suffering from medical disorders, disease and impairment. Yoga in Healthcare (YIH) was formed in order to advocate and represent the needs of healthcare professionals who integrate therapeutic yoga into their current clinical practice.

Advocacy for the recognition of yoga in mainstream healthcare is our core focus.  Healthcare professionals have the competency to analyze and apply yoga philosophy and techniques, within their scope of practice, in an evidence-informed manner through post-professional continuing education training.

There is a growing movement towards recognizing one organization as a gatekeeper for all certification of practitioners utilizing yoga as therapy. While this may be appropriate for those who choose to become yoga therapists who are unlicensed, the organization’s credentialing can have no authority over independently regulated professions such as rehabilitation therapies, nursing, mental health, massage therapy and similar professions who already are able to study and utilize yoga therapeutically through their own licenses or registrations. Study and application of yoga should occur independently and autonomously from, but in partnership with, this and other, yoga organizations.

YIH maintains that licensed, registered, or chartered healthcare professionals can openly integrate yoga modalities at their professional discretion. YIH also maintains that an advanced degree and licensure or registration in a medical profession stipulates that the practitioner possesses commanding knowledge of certain treatments with and without the incorporation of yoga or any other complementary technique they choose to study. This makes the application of yoga through healthcare professionals a unique practice and skill set, separate from the valuable but distinctly different emerging profession of “yoga therapy.”

The YIH mission is to create an independent organization for the preservation of, education of and contribution to, yoga as evidence-based practice in our healthcare system. The Yoga in Healthcare Initiative serves as a platform to educate others as to who we are, what we do, and why yoga in healthcare is valuable, unique and falls under our own professional scope of practices.

This document was created by YIH Founders:
Diana Zotos Florio, Dr. Ginger Garner, Chrys Kub & Shelly Prosko.