It's getting crowded on the road to enlightment...  This is the title of third item in three weeks that the Times has written about yoga and "enlightenment". This is obviously a good selling tactic at the moment, but it might be useful if they got their story straight. In the first item they wrote "how wonderful yoga is for you". Item two said the opposite "yoga is not good for you". Item three mixes up yoga, Buddhism and Kabbalah and how many people are rushing off to India in search of enlightenment, and how much it's all costing us gullible Westerners. The item then goes on to say Julia Roberts converted to Hinduism after appearing in Eat, Pray, Love;  Demi Moore, Britney Spears and Madonna are all followers of Kabbalah; Tiger Woods said his Buddhist Faith would help him recover from sex scandals;  Steven Segal announced in 1997 that he was the reincarnation of a Buddhist lama... Is the Times therefore using the above statements to reassur...

Interesting article about practising yoga in order to relieve back pain in The Times today by Hannah Devlin. Got a pain in the back? Then try yoga instead of a trip to the doctor By Hannah Devlin (The Times) After a 12-week course of yoga, patients with long-term back pain reported less discomfort, performed better physically and were more confident in performing everyday tasks than those offered conventional GP care. While improvements were most pronounced at three months, immediately after the yoga course, people who were assigned to the yoga group still had less pain a year after the start of the study. David Torgerson, director of the Trials Unit at the University of York, said: "Doctors should be able to suggest yoga classes as an approach that could help." The study, published today in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, assigned 156 patients to yoga classes and a control group of 157 patients to standard GP care. Those in the control group received a range o...