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YOGA Conference

• International Conference on Yoga & Ayurveda
  Cancer Prevention & Management - 9 October 2010
  
  

  Venue: One North NTU Alumni Club #03-01, 11 Slim Barracks Rise Singapore 138664
  
  

  Post Conference: - 10th October 2010

  Venue: SPJAIN Center of Management, 10 Hyderabad Road (Off Alexander road) Singapore 119579

   

  

   
   

  Yoga as a way of life, including diet and lifestyle as well as Yogasanas, pranayama and meditation, seems able to impact cancer in many different ways. Cases of patients going into long-term remission from cancer are well known, many apparently stimulated by Yoga practice. This contradicts biomedicine’s standard genomic paradigm of disease, which holds that all pathology arises from genetic damage. Such damage, whether inherited or occurring during life, is held to be irreversible. The number of cases of spontaneous remission thus demonstrates the genomic paradigm to be substantially in error.
  
  This presentation considers a simple extension of the genomic model of disease to include epigenetic phenomena, in terms of which Yoga’s benefits to diseases of all kinds, including cancer, may be understood. The extended disease model includes epigenetic changes in addition to genetic changes, the two being connected by an equivalence principal: The metabolic effect of damaging a gene so that its enzyme can’t function is equivalent to wrongly switching it off so that its protein-enzyme is unexpressed. Pathology caused by failure of a particular enzyme, can thus be either of genetic origin, mutational damage to its gene, or of epigenetic origin – due to the gene being wrongly switched off. In contrast to genetic changes which are considered irreversible, epigenetic changes are in principle reversible. Yoga’s evident ability to reverse epigenetic changes explains its efficacy against chronic diseases.
  
  Cancer is believed to required genetic (or epigenetic) changes to about six genetic loci. To become permanent, this requires failure of genetic repair mechanisms or epigenetic regulation in each site, subsequent immune system failure to destroy the proliferating cells, and the cell’s ability to form a tumor by inducing vascularization.
  
  Holistic Yoga treatment may reduce the probability of these steps of carcinogenesis, or even reverse those that have occurred. Detailed insights into effects of holistic Yoga therapies on specific mechanisms of cancer generation should provide understanding of Yoga’s potential contribution to cancer prevention and remission. They can be used to strengthen Yoga health maintenance and restoration programs, which should be widely instituted as public health initiatives in response to currently increasing levels of cancer incidence.