To describe the personal, professional, practice, service and consumer characteristics of the North American yoga therapy workforce.
Cross-sectional, descriptive survey developed and informed by the contemporary workforce literature. A link to the e-survey was distributed to members of the International Association of Yoga Therapists.
367 members responded (∼20% of eligible participants). Most were aged 40-69 years (88%) and female (91%). Almost half (42%) identified as a "seasoned yoga therapist" and few (9%) graduated from an accredited 800-h yoga therapy program. An average of 8h/week was spent in clinical practice with many (41%) earning an annual income of <US$10,000 from yoga therapy. Practice was informed by twenty different styles of yoga. Urban (39%) and suburban (38.1%) regions were the most common locations of practice. Most therapists conducted therapeutic yoga classes (91%) and 1:1 sessions (94%), with more than half delivering 1-10 therapeutic classes/month (53%) and 1-10 1:1 sessions/month (52%). Conditions seen most frequently were anxiety (77%), back/neck pain (77%) and joint pain/stiffness (67%).
While yoga therapists shared demographic characteristics with other complementary and integrative health (CIH) providers, they tended to work less and earn less than their CIH counterparts. Yoga therapists were less likely to work in rural settings, possibly contributing to the underutilization of yoga in underserved populations. Improving access to yoga therapy services, identifying common core components across the various styles of yoga, and building a stronger evidence-base for key health indications may increase acceptance of, and demand for, yoga therapy.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 6. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 22 January 2024.
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#7,429,171
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#746
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#113,584
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Outputs of similar age from Complementary Therapies in Medicine
#6
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Altmetric has tracked 28,860,665 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 74th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,683 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 20.4. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 55% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 19 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 68% of its contemporaries.
