Viewpoint: Can yoga ‘reprogram’ our DNA? Don’t bet on it – Genetic Literacy Project

David Gorski | August 29, 2017

One of the most persistent narratives latched on to by advocates of integrative medicine is that the mind can somehow heal the body. Sometimes, the claim is that such interventionswork through powerful placebo effects. Sometimes it involves the abuse of emerging science, such overblown claims about what can be accomplishedthrough epigeneticmodificationsof DNA and gene expression.

Mind-body therapies, such as mindfulness-based therapies, are very attractive because they are low cost, dont involve pharmaceuticals, and, above all, provide a sense of control to the patient. Indeed, as ever more rigorous clinical trials find that most of the unconventional therapies (i.e., quackery) that integrative medicine integrates with conventional medicine are elaborate placebos, proponents of integrative medicine increasingly fall back to pointing to modalities like yoga, tai chi, and the like and mindfulness.

[Placebo effects can be] misrepresented as the power of the mind over the body. You can see how mindfulness and other mind-body interactions are just as attractive, because many of them involves actual thinking and meditating. Unfortunately, the science does not (as yet) support many of the overblown claims made for these practices. Its not clear whether it ever will. Certainly its unlikely that they reprogram our DNA.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post:Yawn. Another study tries to convince us that mind-body interventions can reprogram our DNA. It fails.

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Viewpoint: Can yoga 'reprogram' our DNA? Don't bet on it - Genetic Literacy Project