Breast Cancer and Yoga

Marcie Pruett, 39, of San Diego, California has been battling breast cancer for the past three years. After two surgeries, two cycles of chemotherapy and radiation, and a course of oral chemotherapy for the past six months, she feels thirty years older than her age. “My bones and my muscles ache, and it’s difficult to move around or crouch.” Six weeks ago, she started a beginner’s yoga class, and the gentle stretching and rolling that promotes flexibility, strength and mental relaxation has helped her greatly. “I feel good from the night of the class to well into the next day,” she says.

Pruett is not the only one in the yoga class with a connection to breast cancer. Her instructor, Susan Rosen, is a survivor who has made an instructional yoga video for breast cancer survivors and teaches similarly themed workshops, including a class at Kaiser Permanente’s Positive Choice Wellness Center in San Diego.

One of Rosen’s favorite poses for breast cancer patients, shown in the photo above, begins with lying on your back, with arms extended out to the sides and gently supported on blankets. The relaxing pose opens the chest, helps circulation, improves range of motion and helps reduce the discomfort of tight scar tissue. “If you’ve had a mastectomy or lymph nodes removed, restorative poses on your upper body help you to stretch,” Rosen says.

While many in the medical community dismiss mind-body interventions such as yoga, massage, Reiki, and Tai Chi as New Age hocus-pocus, it’s not unusual for cancer patients to use these techniques to help them deal with the lingering side effects of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. There is a small but growing body of evidence that for breast cancer patients yoga improves quality of life, decreases fatigue, reduces stress, and may boost the immune system.

These studies include:

- An M.D. Anderson Cancer Center study that found that women being treated for breast cancer felt better after yoga, with less fatigue and daytime sleepiness.

- A Duke University study of yoga for women with breast cancer that spread beyond the breast found that a customized yoga program led to less pain and fatigue and more relaxation.

- A study of the Iyengar method of yoga conducted at Washington State University, Spokane, found that the style promotes psychological well-being and perhaps boosts the immune system of women in treatment for breast cancer.

Whether certain types of yoga—Indian verus Tibetan, or certain poses, are more beneficial to breast cancer patients, is an open question. “I tell patients to see what works best for them. It’s not always the technique. Sometimes, it can be the instructor,” says M. Alejandro Choul, Ph.D., a mind-body intervention specialist at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who works on the yoga research and teaches classes. He notes that meditation techniques can help ease patients through radiation and chemotherapy, and that patients report that yoga has reduced their pain levels for everything from headaches to shoulder or joint pain.