Author: Carolyn Davis
Publication: Philly.com
Date: December 30, 2009
URL: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20091230_Local_doctor_pushes_health_benefits_of_yoga.html?viewAll=y
When she was a child in India, Veena Gandhi
and her four siblings greeted the sunrise with a half-hour run to build their
courage and 45 minutes of yoga poses to stoke their souls.
All followed by prayer and meditation, it
was the routine their father insisted they follow, even before they ate breakfast.
"My dad was very big on spiritual living
and physical fitness," she says in her Voorhees gynecology office. "He
wanted us to learn to be healthy, to appreciate nature."
Now, Gandhi, 66, is a modern doc who increasingly
relies on ancient techniques, an unabashed advocate of mainstream as well
as alternative health treatments.
She not only spends about 90 minutes each
day practicing her own yoga, she also teaches it to others at Virtua Voorhees
hospital. Gandhi will broaden her yoga instruction in February, when a set
of three instructional DVDs she made in India is expected to go on sale.
While no statistics seem to be kept on how
many doctors double as yoga instructors, the number likely is small.
"I think it's pretty uncommon,"
says Joanne Perron of Gandhi's dual approach to medicine. "What she's
doing is great."
Perron, 51, herself an ob-gyn and a yoga teacher
in Pebble Beach, Calif., serves on the board of the Yoga Alliance, a nonprofit
group with headquarters in Arlington, Va. Its mission includes setting national
educational standards for yoga instructors.
She says the medical establishment is only
starting to realize yoga's health benefits. Some hospitals, including Thomas
Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, offer yoga under the heading
of "integrative medicine."
"They haven't been quick to embrace a
lot of 'alternatives' - and yoga is seen as out of the mainstream," Perron
says. "A lot of people think it's the pretzel poses. It's really about
mindfulness and breath awareness."
Gandhi's zeal for mainstream medicine and
yoga is why a poster of revered Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi (yes, they
are related, she says) hangs in her office next to her medical school diplomas.
It's why, on a wall underneath a rack of pamphlets
discussing yeast infections and colposcopies, leans a poster with photos of
the doctor conducting a yoga seminar.
Loretta Carbonaro was passing Gandhi's office
in 2001 and decided to visit her because other doctors couldn't diagnose the
cause of pain she was having. (Gandhi stopped delivering babies years ago
when malpractice insurance premiums soared.)
"I go to this woman and she diagnoses
me from across the waiting room," says Carbonaro, 46.
Gandhi found an ovarian cyst, removed it,
and urged Carbonaro to try yoga for her general health. The Gibbsboro artist
has been a devotee ever since.
Even though she is doing it on a limited basis
now, Carbonaro says yoga is helping her heal from health problems associated
with a 2006 car accident.
Just as yoga goes back to Gandhi's childhood
in the town of Botad, so does her ambition to go into medicine. She was looking
for a career that was noble, respectable, and financially stable, she says,
so she could use her income to help others.
Along with spirituality and physical fitness,
her family also emphasized the importance of social service and giving back
to their community.
Gandhi's desire to give back to her adopted
country, she says, is why she charges $100 for 11 weeks of two-hour classes
(typically, yoga instruction starts at about $12 a class).
"I lived in this country with a joy,
I learned a lot. I need to give back to this society," she says.
It was in India, though, that Gandhi earned
her medical degree and married her husband, Sharad Gandhi, in 1967. He moved
to New Jersey before his wife to work as an electrical engineer; she joined
him in 1969 after finishing medical school in India.
But her residency at Temple University Hospital,
the birth of two children, and the start of a solo ob-gyn practice in New
Jersey left little time for practicing breathing techniques and postures.
So it wasn't until 1984 that she rediscovered
yoga, at an international conference on Hinduism in New York City. It was
there that she met a teacher from Bangalore, who became her first guru, giving
her readings on yoga and opening her eyes, Gandhi says, to the fullness of
its mental and physical disciplines.
In the late 1980s, she began teaching yoga
to youth groups at her Hindu temple.
"The group needed to learn yogic postures
as I did as a child," she says.
Soon after, Gandhi expanded her teaching to
adults outside of her congregation, fueled by a desire to correct many Americans'
misconception that yoga is no more than body-buffing exercise.
"In my opinion, not even 10 percent is
physical exercise," she says.
Yoga, Gandhi says, is about balancing life
physically and mentally through controlled breathing techniques, meditation,
diet, and the postures.
Cheryl Nelthropp, 48, of Voorhees, says Gandhi's
class, especially learning yogic breathing techniques, has helped ease digestive
problems and arthritic pain in her knees.
Other yoga teachers Nelthropp encountered
didn't talk as much about yoga's philosophy and history and didn't emphasize
proper breathing.
Gandhi also injects the knowledge she has
from being a physician, says Nelthropp, a special-services supervisor for
Camden City public schools.
"I think it gives her more credibility,"
she says.
Gandhi would argue that yoga's results are
the best form of credibility.
If done properly, she says, it can ease or
avert numerous medical conditions, she says.
A growing stack of research agrees.
A study from Georgia State University and
Emory University published in November found that yoga practiced by African
American patients who survived heart failure complemented standard medical
care by improving cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and quality of life.
A study by a yoga research foundation in Bangalore
concluded that women who were stage two and stage three breast cancer outpatients,
and who practiced yoga prior to radiotherapy treatment, had improved "physical
function, role function, social function, and global quality of life."
Jacquelyn Tillery, 61, of Glassboro, who heard
about Gandhi from her cousin, doesn't need a study to prove yoga's benefits.
"I started going to yoga class because
I was having health problems," she says. "It relieves my stress.
It helped me with my lung problems, my breathing, it strengthened my body."
While Gandhi enjoys teaching classes, she
wanted to spread yoga's benefits to more people. After watching all of the
yoga DVDs at her local Camden County library and declaring that they were
insufficient, she decided to produce her own.
She arranged to make the series in India after
her father died in the spring at age 96, and she planned to go with her brother
and their 92-year-old mother, who both live in Kentucky, to scatter his ashes
in the Ganges.
It was glorious, she said, to do the "Salutation
to the Sun" posture as the sun was rising over the river. It was a blissful
experience - just like the bliss Gandhi believes her students will feel from
yoga.
