MOJ Yoga & Physical Therapy Mini Review Open Access The role of Yoga in the complementary treatment of cancer Abstract Volume 2 Issue 3 - 2017 The life of a cancer patient is complicated by a litany of physical, psychological, social 1 2 and spiritual factors leading to anxiety, fatigue, depression and several other unpleasant Neil K Agarwal, Shashi K Agarwal 1 emotional issues. Nausea and vomiting, insomnia and pain also contribute greatly to Hahnemann University Hospital, USA 2 the overall discomfort. These symptoms often result in a significant reduction in the Center for Contemporary and Complementary Cardiology, USA quality of life. A host of non-pharmacological therapeutic interventions have been tried to alleviate this associated physical and emotional issues in cancer patients, with Correspondence: Neil K Agarwal, Hahnemann University limited success. Yoga therapy has increasingly demonstrated evidence based benefits Hospital, USA, Email
[email protected] in alleviating many of these cancer-related symptoms and in greatly improving the quality of life of these patients. Received: May 10, 2017 | Published: September 18, 2017 Keywords: yoga, cancer, anxiety, depression, fatigue, nausea and vomiting, cancer pain, quality of life Introduction Results Yoga evolved over thousands of years in India. The ancient sages Search under ‘yoga and cancer’ revealed 339 citations dating developed this practice as an integrative physical, psychological and back to 1975 on PubMed. PMC revealed 2,736 full length articles. spiritual regimen