Restorative Yoga Helps Speed Healing Process
Published: Thursday, December 22, 2005
Over the past 10 years, yoga has grown in popularity, and it's considered great for flexibility and relaxation. Now, yoga is being used to speed up the healing process in women suffering from breast and ovarian cancer, reported WXII-TV in Winston-Salem.
Susan Reeve is among the believers in yoga. She took time off from her teaching job at Jefferson Elementary School in Winston-Salem after finding a cancerous lump in her breast.
Her time off was tough while undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, but then she heard about a yoga class for cancer patients at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.
It's called restorative yoga, using gentile poses so patients can relax.
"It's a type of yoga that people can do who are very sick, who are fatigued and stressed," said Suzanne Danhauer, associate director of psychosocial oncology at the hospital. "And it's something that's very, very gentle."
It also allows patients to meet others battling cancer. For Reeve, it was the strength of others that put her on the road to recovery.
"(The class) is when I realized that other people are going through this, and I can do this and get through this," she said.