Lifestyle medicine — the use of evidence-based interventions in physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and stress management to treat and prevent chronic disease — is now a formal and growing movement inside medical education worldwide. This shift is beginning to reflect the growing role of yoga in medicine, as yoga moves from the margins into the structures that shape how medicine is taught and understood.
This is not a peripheral trend. It represents a paradigm shift in how medicine is taught — one that recognises lifestyle, movement, and mind-body health as central to clinical practice, not supplementary to it.
In the United States, the lifestyle medicine residency curriculum has been adopted by over 170 institutions and integrated into 370 residency programmes. In the UK, the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine has built a National Undergraduate Lifestyle Medicine Society with representation from medical schools across the country, with an explicit aim to bring lifestyle medicine into medical and health school curricula. The European Lifestyle Medicine Organisation has published guidelines for integrating lifestyle medicine into medical school curricula across Europe. Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School has developed a scholarly concentration in Lifestyle Medicine and Integrative Health, with yoga and mindfulness training among the evidence-based approaches explicitly included alongside nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management.
Yoga is now entering medical schools in three distinct ways — as a tool for teaching gross anatomy, as an introduction to mind-body medicine, and as a response to student burnout. When that happens, it crosses a threshold. It moves from being something offered alongside medicine to something embedded within the paradigm of how medicine is taught and understood. What is taught in medical schools defines what becomes part of clinical thinking. If yoga is part of that education, it is not being added to healthcare. It is becoming part of the paradigm of yoga in medicine.
Yoga in Medicine: Teaching Gross Anatomy Through Movement
Yoga is being used in medical schools to teach gross anatomy through movement, giving students a direct physical experience of the structures, nerve pathways, and systems they would otherwise encounter only through lectures and diagrams. Research consistently shows students report being better able to name muscle groups, understand their function, and recall clinical facts after movement-based sessions.
Learning anatomy through the body introduces a different layer of knowledge, one that is perceptual and experiential rather than purely descriptive. This responds to a recognised problem within medical education. Clinical practice is inherently embodied. Physicians use their hands, eyes, ears, and noses to diagnose and treat, yet training has historically prioritised cognitive knowledge over embodied understanding.
A clinical example from UCSF
One of the most specific recent examples of yoga being used to teach gross anatomy in a medical school is a 2026 paper published in Anatomical Sciences Education from the University of California, San Francisco.
At UCSF, yoga was integrated directly into anatomy and clinical medicine training for medical students, physiotherapy students, and medical residents. Clinicians from anaesthesiology, neurology, orthopaedic surgery, and physiotherapy identified the highest-yield clinically relevant anatomical concepts, and three workshops were developed around them.
Structuring anatomy through movement-based workshops
The first addressed musculoskeletal anatomy. The second covered spinal and peripheral nerves. The third taught neuroanatomy and the neurological exam, the structured clinical assessment that every graduating doctor must be able to perform.
Each workshop followed a complete yoga sequence: warm-up, sun salutations, asana, vinyasa, savasana, and closing meditation. Every element of the practice was explicitly linked to the clinical content being taught. The workshops also examined the etymological roots of anatomical terminology, connecting the Sanskrit and Latin that underpin both yoga and medical language, grounding clinical vocabulary in the practice itself.
From theory to direct clinical experience
Students were not being introduced to yoga as a wellness activity alongside their studies. They were learning the neurological exam through movement, tracing peripheral nerve pathways through posture, and experiencing myotomes, the muscle groups corresponding to specific spinal nerve roots and a core tool in neurological assessment, through sequences designed in direct consultation with practising neurologists.
Yoga as a clinical teaching tool
Pre-testing and post-testing assessed anatomical knowledge, alongside a wellness survey distributed after each session. The workshops have since been taught across medical students, physiotherapy students, and residents, and the paper presents them as a replicable template for clinical education.
This is yoga functioning as a clinical teaching tool, a precise and meaningful distinction from yoga being studied as a health intervention, or offered alongside a curriculum as optional wellbeing support within the wider development of yoga in medicine.
Yoga in Medicine and Mind-Body Medicine Education
Medical schools are introducing yoga as a way of grounding future clinicians in the relationship between the nervous system, breath, and stress physiology — knowledge that has direct relevance to how they will understand and treat patients.
Boston University
At Boston University School of Medicine, Heather Mason — founder of the Minded Institute — developed and taught a course called Embodied Health, bringing yoga, breathwork, and meditation into the medical curriculum alongside neuroscience. The course was built with a specific third aim: to teach students practices they could bring directly to their patients. One student wrote in their evaluation: “I now realise how valuable yoga and other alternative treatments can be in treating chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression. By increasing the tools available to us, we can expand our roles beyond that of medical providers, and instead emerge as practitioners of health.”
Georgetown University
At Georgetown University School of Medicine, a Mind-Body Medicine programme has been integrated into the medical school curriculum, supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. The programme takes medical students through experiential exercises in meditation, guided imagery, biofeedback, breathing techniques, and movement, with the explicit belief that students must experience these approaches themselves to apply them in clinical practice. Medical Education
Harvard Medical School
At Harvard Medical School, the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital runs what is described as one of the highest-rated Harvard Medical School continuing medical education courses, training clinicians in the evidence-based and clinical application of mind-body approaches, including yoga, meditation, and stress physiology. Mind Body Medicine
Stanford University
At Stanford University’s School of Medicine, the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences established YogaX — a formal initiative within Stanford Medicine. YogaX offers yoga teacher training and continuing education designed specifically for healthcare professionals, grounded in neuroscience, biomedical research, and yoga psychology.
Across these programmes, yoga is being positioned not simply as a wellbeing tool, but as part of a broader shift towards yoga in medicine.
Yoga in Medicine as a Response to Student Burnout
Yoga is also being used to address the documented problem of stress and burnout in medical training, with randomised controlled evidence showing it reduces stress in medical students without affecting academic performance.
At Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine, a randomised controlled trial enrolled 64 first-year medical students in yoga sessions timed directly to their anatomy curriculum. The trial found that yoga consistently reduced stress in students — measured both by self-report and objective scale — without detracting from study time.
At the University of Pécs in Hungary, a ten-week yoga programme was run with medical students, finding that yoga reduced stress, depression, and anxiety while improving overall quality of life and mental health. MDPI
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis on yoga in medical education found it has the potential to improve cardiovascular and respiratory function, promote academic satisfaction, and reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. In a training environment where burnout is a documented and serious problem, that is a meaningful finding.
The Growing Appetite for Yoga
In the United States, a survey of medical students found that 92% wanted to learn more about lifestyle medicine in medical school, yet over 90% rated their current knowledge of it as inadequate or poor. ACOFP This is not a fringe interest — it reflects a generation of future doctors who are entering training already aware of the limitations of a purely pharmaceutical and procedural model of care, and who want the tools to do more.
A scoping review of yoga in US medical schools concluded that yoga aligns well with the objectives of medical education by combining physician resiliency, mindfulness, and education that can ultimately serve patients, and called for greater opportunities to engage medical students in yoga across the full length of their undergraduate and graduate training.
The direction is clear; medical students want this education. Medical schools are beginning to provide it. And the research base supporting its inclusion continues to grow. All of these point to a future shaped increasingly by yoga in medicine.
The Minded Institute
The Minded Institute is a UK-based world leader in yoga therapy training, working at the interface between yoga therapy, neurophysiology, psychotherapeutic principles, and evidence-based practice, and actively lobbying for the inclusion of yoga therapy in the NHS.
The inclusion of yoga and yoga therapy into healthcare has been central to our mission from the beginning. We are seeing this movement gathering pace and reflected in our own training, with a growing number of health professionals choosing to study with us.
This is a movement. And it is gathering pace.
