Sahaja Yoga is a Dangerous Cabal of Quacks

"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands."

Douglas Adams

"I just visited an exhibition in a yoga school at Naddi," I told my Tibetan Spirit Guide™ over dinner at McLlo's. "I saw a picture of its founder. She's a plump, smiling woman with a gap in her front teeth."

"Is she a lady with a huge red bindi in the middle of her forehead?" she asked and when I said yes, she told me that she thinks it's a scam. I agreed, and we ordered a plate of paneer pakora in celebration of good sense.

The diastematic yogi we were talking about was Nirmala Srivastava - better known by her more glamourous name, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi. She started off in the early days warning people about 'false gurus' selling false spirituality to make a buck, but then went on to start her own cult of spirituality. She had since claimed to be the incarnation of several prophesied messiahs including the divine Adi Shakti, the Maitreya of Buddhist traditions, and the redeemer of Islam, Mahdi - which is patently absurd because as we all know, Paul Atreides is Mahdi.

Shri Mataji in a goofy wooden crown. She died this recent February.

Let me just say first that I have nothing against yoga or meditation. I think one is a legitimate form of physical exercise while the other is a good method for relaxation. My beef is with Shri Mataji and the unrealistic health benefits she and her people claimed for their particular version of navel-gazing. I have not taken a Sahaja Yoga course but from just the exhibition I visited in one of their centres alone, they have claimed that Sahaja Yoga can treat bronchial asthma, migraine headaches, psychosis, and epilepsy; cure high blood pressure; prevent and treat cancer; stop the spread of AIDS; aid in developing your business; and help your crops grow.

I did not make any of these up. I have photographic evidence of their entire exhibition. They also attribute all these alleged benefits to activating a magic chakra in your sacrum. I did not make that up either.

The woman did love her funny hats, I can tell you.

Now, they exhibited some research data to support their claims and as a Medicinae Baccalaureus, Baccalaureus Chirurgiae, I was trained to look at scientific papers and is expected to be able to sift through the bullshit. Most of the studies were done at the Lady Hardinge Medical College at Delhi, indicating that there is probably at least one Sahaja Yogi in their faculty looking to justify his or her faith in a miracle woman who was Adi Shakti, Maitreya and Mahdi all at the same time.

They Use Poorly Done, Misleading Research.

Let's start. First, we'll take a look at what Sahaja Yogis think causes high blood pressure rather than the usual mundane suspects like sedentary living, obesity, and smoking,

Yes, all of modern medicine was wrong. You get hypertension because your "spleen gets hectic". And magic!

The research was performed on an unspecified number of hypertensive patients divided into two groups, one receiving conventional anti-hypertensive drugs while the other group performed Sahaja Yoga (while also taking their anti-hypertensive meds). The biological parameters they looked at were urinary vanillyl mandelic acid (VMA) levels, blood lactic acid level, and galvanic skin resistance which showed supposed improvements in the group practicing Sahaja Yoga. However, there is a glaring absence of data comparing the blood pressure levels between the straights and the patients who was prescribed yoga. Any paper which proposes a novel treatment for high blood pressure yet neglects to showcase the improvement in the subjects blood pressure is rubbish. I daresay they actually did have the BP results, but chose not to present them in their little exhibition because the differences in the numbers were either unimpressive or non-existent. And considering that they are claiming that Sahaja Yoga is a CURE for hypertension, some actual documentation of long-term blood pressure control would have been nice.

Besides, even if they managed to document a significant drop in blood pressure among the subjects who did yoga, I wouldn't be surprised. It is a known fact in medical science that stress can raise a person's blood pressure, and studies have shown that relaxation therapies are helpful in combating psychological stress. That's essentially what this horribly interpreted research paper showed - the relaxation from doing yoga relieves stress and lowered stress bio-markers like VMA and skin conductance. There's no need to invoke mystical nonsense like opening one's sacral chakra and hectic spleens full of bad qi to explain it.

There were no record of sample sizes and their methodology anywhere in the exhibition and I couldn't locate the original papers either when I searched the literature, but I bet there's more damning evidence of poor research practices in them. The research papers presented for Sahaja Yoga's therapeutic benefits for other diseases like bronchial asthma and migraine headaches were equally misleading.

Their most egregious attempt at bamboozling visitors is their "evidence" that Sahaja Yoga can be used to treat epilepsy; it's a single case study published twenty years ago. That's it. No corroborating details, nothing. And based on that single case study with zero follow-up research after two decades, these kooks unashamedly declared that their yoga is a reasonable avenue of treatment for a very serious class of neurological diseases. The gall of these people!

The department of "curotology"? My bullshit meter just exploded.

They Make Ridiculous Claims Without Any Evidence at All.

After those worthless studies they waved around to give them a façade of scientific legitimacy, they then started making potentially dangerous medical claims without even the pretense of having science to back them up.

They went for broke.

Like all pseudoscientific peddlers of woo, the Sahaja Yogis attempted to dress up their nonsense using scientific terms. They characterised cancer as "psychosomatic disease" and claimed that it is caused by dysfunctions in the mind.

According to Shri Mataji, your neuroses causes cancer.

The word "psychosomatic" has very specific definitions within medicine. It means relating to, involving, or concerned with bodily symptoms caused by mental or emotional disturbance. Conversion disorder, somatisation disorder and hypochondriasis are examples of disorders grouped under this category of pathology. Cancer, in all its myriad and protean forms, was never classified under that tiny umbrella in the entire history of modern medicine.

This is a dangerous notion. Telling cancer patients that their disease was caused by their fears, insecurities, helplessness and depression - and then proposing that it can be treated by just thinking right - can kill a lot of innocent (if gullible) people, especially if they buy fully into this quack idea and forgo the conventional treatments; many of which are admittedly unpleasant. And if cancer is indeed "all in the head" as proposed by these yogi wackjobs, why then do babies get leukaemia? Are they so neurotic that they thought their cancers into existence?

In lieu of any scientific evidence, they simply explained how Sahaja Yoga treats cancer using arcane balderdash. You have to read it to believe it,

Being on edge and hormonal give you cancer. Got it.

Hectic spleen? Again? Does it mean that if you had a splenectomy, you will never get hypertension or cancer?

I just noticed that the guy in the diagram has a pretty flower on the top of his head.

Yes! Fight cancer with the power of! Positive! Thinking!

Their Founder was Insane.

The Sahaja Yoga movement is an organisation of charlatans founded and led by a delusional self-aggrandising swami who thought she's the Chosen One of three different major world religions - and I bet if she had lived any longer she would have revealed that she's the Second Coming of Christ as well. I couldn't find any reports on the cause of her death but it was said that in her final years, she was medicated with risperidone, a potent antipsychotic drug. Makes the claim that Sahaja Yoga is able to treat psychosis sounds hollow now, doesn't it? 

Also, the possibility that Shri Mataji was mentally ill explains a whole lot actually. People does have a tendency to consider the ramblings of a mad person to be holy words and would follow them to ridiculous, self-destructive lengths. Think the Reverend Jim Jones, Charles Manson and that guy from 7th century Mecca. Anyway, I hope this article have helped encourage you to turn a more sceptical eye towards miracle cures hawked by New Age con artists like the Sahaja Yogis. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

So, do you still want to know how Sahaja Yoga can help your geraniums grow?

Why yes, Mother! Chastity DOES help prevent sexually transmitted diseases!

P.S. Next up: traditional Tibetan medicine! Yes, I've been investigating quacky pseudoscience on my backpacking trip through the Western Himalayas. It's what I do for fun.

P.P.S. The Tibetan Spirit Guide™ is the codename for my friend and contact in McLeod Ganj. You'll hear more about her soon.

UPDATE: The powers that be at Unscientific Malaysia (an online community dedicated to science and scepticism) picked up this article and republished it on their website.

Intrepid sceptical investigator,

k0k s3n w4i