EVMS doctor explores benefits of ancient yoga
By Elizabeth Simpson
The Virginian-PilotAs a critical-care specialist, Dr. Alexander Levitov has been a longtime student of the fundamentals of survival:
Blood flow. Body temperature. Brain activity.
The lessons have mainly surfaced in operating rooms and research labs, but in October, the Eastern Virginia Medical School professor traveled across the globe in pursuit of raw data.
The study site was the Himalayan mountains, in passes as high as 16,400 feet, with temperatures as low as 5 degrees.
His subjects: Tibetan monks.
The practice he wanted to study is called "tumo" (sometimes spelled "g tum-mo") - a Tibetan word meaning "inner fire."
Buddhist monks train for years to do this yoga practice, which is passed from generation to generation and entails sitting cross-legged, naked or nearly so, on icy mountaintops or in glacial waterfalls while meditating.
Those conditions could kill a normal person, or at least cause him to shiver uncontrollably, but the monks somehow endure the experience for hours, even continuing through the night.
If such feats were possible, Levitov thought, then perhaps the monks' knowledge could benefit Westerners as well: "Physiological extremes are quite revealing. We deal with physiological extremes all the time; that's our bread and butter."
Few U.S. doctors had studied the practice, even though such "mind-over-matter" techniques could be channeled to help people improve blood circulation, reduce stress, even lose weight.
"People who accept these practices accept them unconditionally with no need for scientific evidence," Levitov said. "And the scientific community is hesitant to look into it because they don't want to be considered bizarre."
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Levitov became interested in the topic after he published a study on the effect of "passive leg raising" - elevating patients' legs after a medical crisis - on blood flow and retention of fluid in the critically ill.
That led him to look into the impact of other reverse positions, such as the yogic practice of performing headstands.
Before long, he was learning about the ancient practice of tumo in monasteries of Tibet and India. The monks traditionally do not perform it close to buildings, large concentrations of people or other influences collectively known as "foul air."
So for Levitov, that meant traveling to them.
He connected with Rinad Minvaleev, a physiologist and professor from St. Petersburg, Russia, who has spent more than a decade studying Tibetan monks. Minvaleev befriended them, learned the meditation technique, and, in turn, taught others to better tolerate the cold using this "inner body yoga."
Over the years, Minvaleev also has led regular expeditions of doctors and researchers to observe the monks, believing they had tapped into a way to burn fat deposits to produce heat that kept them warm.
Levitov, 58, volunteered to go on an expedition with Minvaleev at his own expense.
An expert in ultrasound medicine, Levitov has written textbooks about the scanning devices that use sound waves to observe what's going on in the body. Newer models are portable enough to be taken into the mountains.
Levitov's aim was not to study the meditative or religious aspects of the practice - which a scientist would be hard-pressed to quantify - but rather to measure, as he puts it, "the physiological underpinnings."
Full article read in the link below
http://hamptonroads.com/2013/04/evms-doctor-explores-benefits-ancient-yoga
Ravi
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