What’s This Research About?
CTS affects a significant number of Americans and is a cause for lost earnings
for employees and businesses. Rehabilitation can be expensive and time consuming.
Yoga has been shown to positively affect musculoskeletal conditions so they wanted
to see how a carefully designed yoga program might affect a group of people who
have CTS. How will it help the rehabilitation process? They assumed that a yoga
program might be a useful and less expensive alternative to (or supplement for)
drug treatments, rehabilitation or surgery.
They thought stretching might relieve compression in the joint and blood flow may
improve in the nerve. These are assumptions that were not tested or proven.
TITLE: Yoga-based intervention for carpal tunnel syndrome: a randomized trial
PUBLICATION: Journal of American Medical Association
DATE: 1998
AUTHORS : Marian Garfinkel, Atul Singhal, Warren Katz, David Allan, Rosemary Reshetar, Ralph Schumacher
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS): a medical condition in which the median nerve is compressed in the wrist and can cause tingling, pain and numbness in the upper extremity. It is often a result of repetitive stress and overuse. A 2010 study indicated that 5% of people in the US have CTS (Bickel, KD January 2010).