Effects of yogic practices on polypharmacy

Abstract

The occurrence and concurrency of Noncommunicable chronic diseases increase with age, and therefore, the number of medications used increases correspondingly. Polypharmacy is a scenario in which five medications or more are consumed concurrently (regardless of dose and duration of consumption), which leads to reduced quality of life, physical problems, increased drug interactions, adverse effects, and medical complications and increases the cost of treatment. Moreover, polypharmacy increases the incidence of falls, frequency of hospital admission, length of stay, and the death rate among patients, especially in the elderly population. This would allow therapies like Yoga, pranayama, and meditation to act as an effective mainstay or adjunctive or alternative therapy for many disorders, as it can be cost-effective, patient-compliant, and clinically efficacious with the most negligible side effects. However, very few studies have focused on the impact of yogic practices on reducing drug dosage or polypharmacy among patients. Hence, a Medline English literature search was planned to review all the studies demonstrating a dose-response effect between yogic practices and the number/dosage of medication reduction in different disorders. Data extracted and analyzed depicted that the practice of Yoga, pranayama, and meditation can result not only in reducing the number of medications but also the dosages in hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, bronchial asthma, arthritis, sleep disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), gastrointestinal disorders like constipation and irritable bowel syndrome.