Non-Pharmacological Interventions
Yoga, Qigong, Tai Chi, clinical exercise
15 interventions. 6 rest on strong human evidence. Ordered with the best evidenced first.
Movement as Medicine, With Evidence That Rivals Drugs for Depression
The closest thing in this library to a universal prescription: for depression, controlled trials put aerobic exercise on par with antidepressants, and the mechanisms are now well understood.
Balance and Fall-Prevention Training
Slow, deliberate practice of standing, stepping, and shifting weight that is among the few non-drug interventions with high-certainty trial evidence for cutting the rate of falls in older adults.
Graded Movement as First-Line Care for Persistent Pain
One of the better-evidenced and most counterintuitive findings in pain care: for many persistent pain conditions, graded movement, not rest, is first-line, and it works partly by retraining the nervous system.
Exercise Oncology (Prescribed Exercise During and After Cancer Treatment)
Once told to rest, cancer patients are now handed an exercise prescription, and for colon cancer a randomized trial reports it can lengthen survival itself.
Resistance Training (as a Non-Pharmacological Intervention)
strong_evidence: the deliberate loading of muscle against progressive resistance, once the discipline of wrestlers and warriors, now sits among the most strongly evidenced movement interventions in clinical medicine.
Chinese Internal Art, and the Best Fall-Prevention Evidence in the Library
A slow Chinese internal art with unusually strong evidence for one outcome that matters enormously in older age: preventing the falls that drive injury and mortality.
Aquatic Therapy and Hydrotherapy (Water-Based Exercise and Rehabilitation)
Warm water carries most of your body weight, so people who cannot train on land can move, load, and rebuild in the pool.
Clinical Pilates (physiotherapy-led Pilates; Contrology lineage)
A physiotherapist's recasting of Joseph Pilates' century-old "Contrology," precise enough to rival generic exercise for chronic low back pain, with marketing that often sprints well past the data.
Mind-Body Movement (overview): yoga, tai chi, qigong, Feldenkrais
A family of slow, attentive practices that couple deliberate movement to breath and inward focus, with the strongest clinical signal for balance and fall prevention in older adults.
Nordic Walking (pole walking, sauvakavely)
Walking with engineered poles that adds upper-body and metabolic work to an ordinary stroll, developed from how Finnish skiers stayed fit when the snow melted.
Qigong (qi gong, chi kung, ch'i kung)
A two-thousand-year-old Chinese practice of coordinated breath, slow movement, and focused attention that holds up modestly as gentle exercise while its older claim, that a practitioner can emit healing energy, remains unsupported.
Walking Prescription (Prescribed Walking / Walking on Referral)
Among the oldest written exercise prescriptions, promoted today as a low-cost, widely accessible dose of aerobic movement.
A 3,500-Year Tradition, One or Two of Its Eight Limbs, and a Billion-Dollar Industry
One of the most ancient and most commercially distorted traditions in the library: strong evidence for back pain and anxiety, an eight-limbed philosophy reduced to its postures, and a real and under-acknowledged injury record.
Dance/Movement Therapy
A clinical profession formalized in 1940s psychiatric wards around what San trance-healers, Zar circles, and Indian temple dancers had practiced for thousands of years: the body moving as a way through what words cannot reach.
Stretching and Mobility Work (flexibility training, static / dynamic / PNF / ballistic stretching, mobility routines)
Stretching reliably buys you range of motion, but the popular promises that it prevents injuries or erases next-day soreness are the parts the trials do not back up.