Most individuals affiliate yoga with wellness lessons, flexibility, and stress aid. Few think about it being practiced inside a hospital room by somebody present process chemotherapy or recovering from surgical procedure. But in prime most cancers facilities, yoga remedy reshapes affected person care from the within out. It isn’t a substitute for medication however a medical companion to it—a therapeutic modality designed to cut back struggling and help therapeutic in medically built-in methods.
Smitha Mallaiah, MSc, C-IAYT, is on the centre of this transformation, a Senior Thoughts-Physique Intervention Specialist on the College of Texas MD Anderson Most cancers Middle. For over 20 years, Smitha has helped sufferers navigate most cancers care utilizing individualized, evidence-based yoga remedy protocols. Her work—each in direct affected person care and medical trials—is advancing a future the place yoga remedy turns into an ordinary, not a luxurious, in oncology.
What Is Yoga Remedy—And Why Is It Totally different?
Yoga remedy isn’t merely yoga modified for the unwell—it’s a definite, evidence-informed medical self-discipline grounded in therapeutic targets moderately than bodily health. What units it aside from normal yoga lessons is its excessive diploma of customization, its integration with medical therapy plans, and its supply by licensed professionals educated in each yogic science and biomedical rules. It’s tailor-made to a affected person’s evolving bodily and psychological wants and is commonly delivered in collaboration with physicians, nurses, and psychological well being suppliers.
This isn’t simply semantics—it could imply the distinction between coping and being overwhelmed. Within the palms of expert clinicians like Smitha, yoga remedy can scale back struggling, restore company, and help the entire individual—not simply handle the illness.
Her interventions are numerous. She may supply guided breathwork for a affected person experiencing insomnia or lead a dyadic session involving a affected person and their caregiver to assist handle emotional stress collectively. The whole lot is responsive, personalized, and aware of the physique’s limitations and the thoughts’s wants.
Bridging Custom and Trendy Drugs
Smitha’s journey started in Bengaluru, India, the place she accomplished her first yoga instructor coaching in 2003 at Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (SVYASA). Inside two years, she was working towards yoga remedy in medical settings. When she joined MD Anderson in 2011, she shortly grew to become a driving pressure in launching the establishment’s first devoted yoga remedy clinic.
In the present day, Smitha gives care to each inpatient and outpatient populations. Inpatients usually require quick help for acute signs like ache, nausea, or nervousness. These transient, bedside periods—typically solely 20-Half-hour—supply grounding in moments of intense vulnerability. Outpatients, alternatively, interact in longer, progressive periods aimed toward constructing resilience over time. These could embrace meditation, guided respiration, and restorative motion.
By offering continuity throughout the most cancers journey, Smitha can tailor remedy as a affected person’s situation evolves—from prognosis and lively therapy to survivorship and, when wanted, end-of-life help. This longitudinal mannequin allows deep, individualized therapeutic and fosters a therapeutic belief that turns into a part of the care itself.
Analysis That Strikes the Area Ahead
Smitha’s affect extends past the therapy room and into medical analysis. As a clinician-researcher, she has helped construct the educational foundations of yoga remedy in oncology, co-authoring quite a few peer-reviewed research that present its worth in bettering affected person outcomes.
One notable examine targeted on sufferers with high-grade gliomas present process radiotherapy. Those that obtained individualized yoga periods reported higher sleep, decreased fatigue, and larger emotional resilience in comparison with management teams. In one other involving sufferers with head and neck most cancers and their caregivers, a structured dyadic yoga protocol led to fewer emergency room visits, decrease ranges of symptom misery, and improved psychosocial functioning.
Even on the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Smitha’s staff discovered methods to innovate. Their findings on telehealth yoga remedy revealed that even remotely delivered periods may preserve effectiveness in decreasing ache and emotional misery. These research validate yoga remedy—and supply hospitals concrete fashions for integration.
Collectively, this analysis exhibits that yoga remedy isn’t simply supportive—it’s strategic—delivering measurable advantages throughout the bodily, emotional, and systemic dimensions of care.
Increasing the Workforce and Shaping Schooling
Past her medical and analysis work, Smitha is dedicated to shaping the subsequent era of yoga therapists. As Program Director at SVYASA Houston, she has developed a curriculum that blends conventional yogic science with Western medical frameworks, emphasizing moral, evidence-informed, and culturally delicate care. Her curriculum prepares college students to instruct and collaborate inside interdisciplinary healthcare groups and adapt their observe to complicated medical eventualities.
Her affect additionally extends to nationwide and world skilled organizations. As co-chair of the Society for Integrative Oncology’s Yoga Particular Curiosity Group and a member of the certification committee on the Worldwide Affiliation of Yoga Therapists (IAYT), Smitha helps outline what high quality, accountable, and clinically competent yoga remedy appears like in in the present day’s healthcare panorama.
Addressing Boundaries to Entry and Consciousness
Regardless of this progress, yoga remedy nonetheless faces systemic challenges. Many healthcare professionals stay unaware of what it’s—or the way it differs from leisure yoga—resulting in underutilization. Insurance coverage gaps usually block affected person entry, with most providers not reimbursed. There’s additionally a notable scarcity of licensed medical yoga therapists in hospital settings. And underserved communities, together with non-English-speaking populations, are ceaselessly excluded from care.
Smitha is tackling these challenges by advocacy, group collaboration, and institutional engagement. Her imaginative and prescient is to carry yoga remedy into group hospitals, develop language entry, and advocate for coverage adjustments that acknowledge yoga remedy as a reimbursable part of complete care.
“This work shouldn’t be seen as non-obligatory,” she says. “It’s integral to whole-person care.”
Last Ideas
Most cancers therapy usually narrows its focus to biology—cells, tumors, and medical indicators. However therapeutic occurs in folks, not simply in our bodies. Sufferers navigating most cancers face worry, grief, isolation, and exhaustion—usually in silence. Yoga remedy meets them there.
Smitha Mallaiah’s work displays a altering paradigm in healthcare—one the place therapeutic contains extra than simply medication, presence, breath, and customized care are acknowledged as important elements of restoration, and sufferers are supported not simply to outlive however to seek out that means and grounding of their journey.
“Yoga remedy doesn’t change medical care,” Smitha says. “It completes it.”
