Anesthesia by itself is no cure, surgery without anesthesia may Yoga alliance be intolerable, but used together they have saved many lives. Yoga may add usefully to Yoga alliance treatments for pain, combining with medicines, massage, physical therapy, acupuncture, or other adjunctive therapies such as Alexander technique to yield a synergy that is very much to the patient’s advantage. Many of the asana, or yoga postures, that we offer in this book might look familiar to any of you who have done stretching or calisthenics. In fact, there has been a good deal of interchange in both directions; a fair number of asana originating from other types of physical culture such as gymnastics were then described in yoga texts within the last few centuries.
4 At some point, from one source or another, they have been adopted and adapted by body workers. Physiatrists, physical therapists, instructors of Alexander, Feldenkrais, Pilates, and Kinetic Awareness, and other types of therapists may recognize some of the postures and strategies that we are about to describe. One response might be, I’ve already seen this. There’s nothing new here.
