Using yoga to connect with the body-mind

"Now that we have all these new brain scans they are confirming what meditators for thousands of years have recognized: that these techniques literally change the wiring in the brain. So we have that ability to recreate our own mind. Meditation to me is kind of like training the mind, like if you're an athlete and you can get better at basketball by practicing basketball, meditation is like that. It's like practice.

[Yoga] can be used to relax and eliminate or minimize stress. It can be used therapeutically to eliminate a lot of musculoskeletal problems from back to shoulders, neck issues. It can be used to improve strength, to bring about general sense of well-being. And also, to really improve people's self-confidence. It has an emphasis on connectedness, how things are not separate, and what's happening in the classroom is not separate from what's happening at home or at the job, between your friends, so I think yoga is healing in that way. A lot of the pain and suffering we put ourselves through is some kind of disconnect.

I have a degree in chemistry and a degree in pharmacy. I have worked in different capacities in the pharmacy, from dispensing for several years to running a pharmacy up on the Navajo reservation. One of the things I love about Poison Control is rather than dispensing drugs, I get to dispense information. Drugs can be wonderful — the medicines we have today, properly used, are incredible. But any medicine has the potential downside.

All of the drugs, especially the more potent ones that we've developed, have the potential for severe adverse affects. My work with Poison Control is about controlling those and dealing with some of the issues that come up because medications are available. Some of the things that we deal with there are kids getting into medications. If [medications] just weren't in the house, a kid wouldn't get into it. If there are no serious drugs in the house, there's just that much less for them to get into.

If I have bronchitis and pneumonia, I'm going to have my doctor give me the right antibiotic, do the test to find out which one will work and give it to me. But I don't want medicine for the flu. That's not going to do anything for a viral infection.

When it comes to things more complicated like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and behavioral issues, we need to look at the same thing. There might be some role for drugs, but just because you give the drugs to 20 people and 15 or 18 of them are easier to control in class doesn't mean that they are worth giving. You need to look at long-term affects. The stimulant drugs cause nervousness and the release of stress chemicals, and stress is part of the whole problem of ADHD.

Our medical system, the way science works, it's easier to study a drug.

You can do good science on a drug and say Ritalin works better than a sugar pill. But it's really hard to do those studies on meditation or acupuncture, that don't work so simply and don't have a good control group like drugs.

One of the reasons the whole medical system is skewed toward pills is because it's easy to study. That doesn't mean it's the most effective, it means that it's the easiest to show benefits in a scientific study.

The way drugs are approved, unfortunately, fuels overdosing because in order to get the drug approved, the company needs to show a huge percentage response. Therefore [the company] encourages dosing at a higher level, not necessarily the optimal level.

[Drugs are approved by] multiple phases of trials to establish different safeties.

The first safety is an animal model, and then safety in humans. They get the kinetics of how [the drug] gets into the blood and how it gets excreted. And this is almost always done in healthy adult males. With drugs used in children, they do these studies in adults, so we're not sure how meaningful they are.

I've worked with several adults with ADHD and without a doubt, to me, in my mind meditation should be first line of treatment — not that there can't be other treatments that go along with it, or are added if the meditation does not seem to have full effect.

I try and get yoga available. YogaReach is a group that I helped start that goes into the schools and offers yoga classes. It's designed to go into the underserved areas and bring some of those programs that typically richer, more wealthy communities or school systems would have.

I think that if the teachers start seeing that 'Wow, six kids who went to mediation group are really easier to control, they're really behaving well,' then I think it really will begin to snowball."