One of the big health trends for 2013 is drug companies and insurance giants looking beyond drugs patients take to behavioral, "outcome-based" approaches -- like United Health Group's partnership with YMCAs and Walgreens for a program to help prevent and control diabetes. Money-saving ideas may also be health-creating ideas. And...

Scientific research into what medical conditions yoga can heal and how it does its work is blossoming. Last year the National Institutes of Health funded 30 clinical trials covering everything from yoga for back pain to cognitive function, blood pressure, irritable bowel, and cardiovascular disease risk. Others in my community...

Non-invasive alternative therapies are often compatible with conventional treatments for back pain, have a relatively lower cost and can sometimes be done at home. Trying one or a combination (medicine, yoga and pilates, for instance) may significantly reduce pain. Remember, alternative therapies are not a substitute for medical diagnosis and...

When a major medical journal such as the Archives of Internal Medicine publishes a clinical trial showing the effects of yoga for low back pain, the yoga community (and increasingly, the medical establishment) sits up and takes notice. The study, which came out yesterday, was long awaited and...

A painful surgery with a long recovery time and often disappointing results costing in excess of $12,000 is the standard treatment for rotator cuff tear, an upper extremity injury so common it showed up in almost 61 percent of shoulders in one study. Many patients with rotator cuff...

Yesterday, several people called my Columbus Circle office with urgent appointment requests. It turned out three of them had a common, suddenly severely painful condition some doctors don't believe exists -- sacroiliac joint derangement.

Like several other back problems, sacroiliac joint derangement is difficult to diagnose and while...

Last Tuesday, a 40-year-old communications expert came to me for help with the intense pain in his back and awful, lightning-like sensations going down his leg. It was worst when he walked and not so bad when he rode his bicycle. An MRI showed two problems: spinal stenosis (a narrowing...

Back pain is a common condition that most of us will experience at some point in our lives. Here are a few tips that may relieve the pain.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine, who was head writer for a television soap opera, came to me saying she needed to write more than 40 pages of script every week, but she could not push down the keys on the computer. Her right thumb, index finger,...

Twenty years of treating people whose backs ache, trying to help thousands find its cause and deal with its crippling challenges, I have developed my own set of ideas for what to do when your back hurts, when you have a pain in the butt or when nasty sensations radiate...

There are many types of arthritis, but osteoarthritis -- the wear-and-tear-condition that affects us all to one degree or another as we grow older -- is mainly a problem with the cartilage within joints. When a joint works properly, bones, bathed in lubricating synovial fluid, slide along each other smoothly....

Women (and men!) of a certain age who have been diagnosed with osteoporsis are frequently prescribed a bisphosphonate like Fosamax, Boniva, Actonel, Altevia or Reclast. In 2009 more than 5 million prescriptions for these drugs were written. But, as time has gone on, the dangers of long-term use of these...

About 5 million of the 26 million Americans who suffer from low back pain each year have piriformis syndrome. Piriformis syndrome produces an intense, sometimes crippling pain deep in the butt cheek, usually just on one side. It's caused by jogging for miles, marathon sessions with the computer and with...

Your back is killing you. You've gone to your internist. You've gotten a diagnosis and possibly medications and an injection. Still it hurts. You're ready to try just about anything. Alternative therapies are effective and can often be used in conjunction with conventional medical treatments.

Just as...

As a physician and advocate of integrative medicine, I have shown that Yoga can improve upon or substitute for traditional Western medical treatments for osteoporosis, which affects 200 million people worldwide. And I have co-authored "Yoga for Osteoporosis" (scheduled for publication by WW Norton on March 29, 2010) to provide...