Dr. Raghavendra Rao Mohan
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Yoga · Naturopathy · Evidence
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Dr. Raghavendra Rao Mohan
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By Dr. Raghavendra Rao Mohan - Director, CCRYN, Ministry of AYUSH

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Portrait of Dr. Raghavendra Rao Mohan
About the author

Dr. Raghavendra Rao Mohan

An integrative-medicine scientist who has spent two decades giving traditional Indian wellness practices the one thing they were often denied — rigorous clinical proof. He holds a PhD in Yoga and Life Sciences from S-VYASA University, Bengaluru, and built the ESMO-accredited integrative oncology programme at Health Care Global, South Asia's largest cancer network.

He now serves as Director of the Central Council for Research in Yoga & Naturopathy under the Ministry of AYUSH, and edits the Indian Journal of Yoga & Naturopathy. His collaborations reach from UCSF to MD Anderson. This book is the argument he has been making, quietly, in journals for twenty years - written at last for everyone else.

5+ Publications h-index 23 Director, CCRYN Ministry of AYUSH
Yoga · Naturopathy · Evidence

[ Book Title Placeholder ]

A working subtitle goes here — the promise of the book in one line.

Dr. Raghavendra Rao Mohan
The breath is the only function of the body that answers both to instinct and to intention. That is why it is a door, and why this book stands in it. From the author's note
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Contents

Contents

  • IThe Measured Breath1
  • IITwo Vocabularies12
  • IIIWhat a Trial Can See34
  • IVThe Ward and the Mat58
  • VThe Everyday Prescription79
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Chapter OneThe Measured Breath
Chapter One

The Measured Breath

Every clinical trial begins with a question, and every yoga practice begins with a breath. For most of the last century these two beginnings were kept in separate rooms — one in the laboratory, one on the mat — and each was assured, by people who ought to have known better, that the other had nothing to teach it.

I have spent twenty years standing in the corridor between those two rooms. It is a draughty place. But it is, I have come to believe, the only honest address for anyone who wants to know what these practices actually do.

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The Measured Breath

The corridor is not a comfortable place to stand. The laboratory suspects the mat of wishful thinking; the mat suspects the laboratory of missing the point entirely. Both suspicions have earned their keep. I have read papers that measured a great deal and understood very little, and I have sat in halls where a beautiful claim was made about the human body with nothing behind it but confidence.

But a woman halfway through chemotherapy, lying awake at three in the morning, does not care which of the two rooms her relief comes from. She cares whether it comes. That is the whole of my professional interest, and it has kept me busy for two decades.

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Chapter TwoTwo Vocabularies
Chapter Two

Two Vocabularies

Ask a physiologist what happens during a slow, unhurried exhalation and you will hear about vagal tone, about baroreceptor sensitivity, about a heart rate that quietly settles. Ask a practitioner of prāṇāyāma the same question and you will hear about steadiness — about a mind that has stopped running ahead of itself.

Two vocabularies. One event. The instruments disagree only because they were built to notice different things.

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Two Vocabularies

Translation, though, is not the same as reduction. To say that meditation is a shift in autonomic balance is a little like saying a symphony is a pattern of air pressure. The statement is true. It is simply not the whole of what is true, and a reader who mistakes one for the other has been short-changed twice over.

So I try to hold two sentences in my head at once. The first: whatever cannot be measured must not be asserted as fact. The second: whatever cannot yet be measured has not thereby been disproved. Most bad thinking in this field comes from dropping one of those sentences.

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Chapter ThreeWhat a Trial Can See
Chapter Three

What a Trial Can See

A randomised controlled trial is a narrow instrument, and its narrowness is precisely its virtue. It is a question asked so carefully that the world cannot answer it by accident.

It can tell you whether a group of women receiving chemotherapy slept better than a group who did not practise. It can tell you what happened to their fatigue scores, their cortisol rhythm, their capacity to hold a number in mind. What it cannot tell you is what the practice meant to any single one of them.

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What a Trial Can See

And so we learn to ask questions the instrument can answer, and we ask them properly: with randomisation, with a control arm, with outcomes named in advance so that we cannot quietly move the target after the fact. This is not hostility to tradition. It is the respect one shows a claim by taking it seriously enough to test it.

I keep a second notebook for everything that falls outside — the things patients say in the last minute of a session, when the recorder is off. It is not evidence. But it is often where the next good question is hiding.

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Chapter FourThe Ward and the Mat
Chapter Four

The Ward and the Mat

The yoga we teach in an oncology ward is not the yoga of a photograph. There is no headstand. There is, very often, a chair, a folded blanket, and six minutes of breathing done with the eyes closed while a drip runs.

A therapy must meet the body it actually finds, not the body it wishes it had found. Everything worth knowing about clinical yoga follows from that one sentence.

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Chapter FiveThe Everyday Prescription
Chapter Five

The Everyday Prescription

You do not need an hour. You do not need a mat, a teacher, or a Sanskrit word you cannot pronounce. You need ten quiet minutes, taken at the same time each day, for long enough that the days begin to expect them.

Sit. Let the exhalation grow slightly longer than the inhalation. Do not force it; nothing worth having in this practice has ever been forced. Begin where the breath already is.

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