Loren Fishman, MD, PhD, has worked with more than 20,000 patients having lower back pain, and has successfully prescribed yoga for most of them. He served as chief resident at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and also wrote computerized programs to treat cognitive deficits, some now patented by IBM, and artificial intelligence ways to predict patients’ safe length of hospital stay. He has written and edited more than 12 books and 95 academic chapters and articles, including a peer-reviewed article based on interviews of 33,000 yoga teachers and therapists about yoga injuries. His work has been reviewed in articles by the New York Times, Spine, Muscle and Nerve, and a number of international periodicals.

He is past president of the New York Society of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, currently associate editor of Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation, on the staff at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and has been a keynote speaker at meetings of the International Association of Yoga Practitioners and the Smithsonian Institute. He has been featured on Diane Sawyer’s World News and NPR, and in the Wall Street Journal. Fishman earned an advanced degree in philosophy of mathematics from Oxford University in England. Before attending medical school, he spent a year studying with B.K.S. Iyengar in Pune, India.

Fishman has a private practice in Manhattan and has practiced yoga daily for more than 40 years. His 12 books include the best-selling Yoga for Osteoporosis and Yoga for Arthritis (W.W. Norton), Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis, and his most recent, Healing Yoga: Yoga Cures for 20 Common Conditions.