Yoga in Cancer Care: A Decade of Evidence for an Emerging Clinical Specialty
Ten years ago, a yoga therapist suggesting their practice belonged inside an oncology treatment plan would have had to make that case largely on instinct and compassion. That is no longer true, and that shift deserves to be known more widely, especially among the people doing this work.
In 2018, researchers conducted the most comprehensive review to date of yoga's role in cancer care, searching PubMed through the end of 2016 and identifying 138 clinical trials that met inclusion criteria, 110 of them randomized or non-randomized controlled trials, spanning more than 10,660 patients across 20 countries (Agarwal & Maroko-Afek, International Journal of Yoga, 2018). That is not a handful of hopeful pilot studies. That is a substantial, internationally replicated body of evidence, built by researchers who wanted to know, rigorously, whether this was real.
The review's conclusion was direct: "in the vast majority of the studies, the yoga intervention was found to be beneficial and yielded positive effect on all the measures." Patients across breast, colorectal, lung, and blood cancers, along with hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients, showed improvements in physical symptoms, psychological symptoms, quality of life, treatment-related side effects, and markers of immunity, inflammation, and stress. The authors described the accumulated findings as offering "strong support for yoga's integration into conventional cancer care."
Two things are equally true here, and both deserve care. First, yoga's role is as an adjunct, not a treatment. The same review states plainly that direct evidence for yoga preventing cancer, halting its progression, or curing it is "almost lacking," and the authors are clear that yoga walks alongside surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, never in place of them. Second, most of this evidence comes from breast cancer populations; the case for other cancer types, while promising, is still being built, patiently, study by study.
What the evidence supports clearly, and what matters enormously to an actual person living through treatment, is yoga's role in symptom management and quality of life: reduced anxiety and depressive symptoms, better sleep, less fatigue, and measurable shifts in stress and inflammation markers. These are not small things when you are the one going through it. They are, often, the difference between a hard season and an unbearable one.
This is exactly the kind of adjunct, evidence-grounded work a trained yoga therapist can offer that a general yoga teacher is not prepared for: modifying practice around a client's treatment stage, energy level, and physical limitations, staying in real communication with the client's oncology team, and knowing which practices belong at which point in a treatment course. It takes genuine clinical literacy to do this well, not just good intentions, however sincere.
Prema Yoga Institute's Yoga Therapy Certification includes a dedicated Cancer Care practicum specialization for students who want to show up for this work fully prepared. See current practicum and certification details.