Yoga is one of the most widely studied complementary practices in integrative oncology, now incorporated into clinical practice guidelines and supportive cancer care programs worldwide. Yet the yoga that appears in Western clinical trials bears only partial resemblance to the Indian traditions it derives from. In this webinar, presented by Leigh Leibel, a clinician-researcher specializing in mind-body medicine and cancer survivorship, we examine what happens when a 2,500-year-old system of philosophy and practice is extracted, standardized, and evaluated using methods that may not fully capture it — and explore five tensions that researchers, clinicians, and systematic reviewers rarely name explicitly: historical distortion; invisible evidence; the manualization problem; outcome mismatch; and ethical engagement.
These questions have direct implications for trial design, intervention fidelity, evidence synthesis, and clinical practice. Underlying all of them is the more fundamental one: when a healing practice travels from one culture into another’s medical system, who gets to define what counts as evidence, and what do we owe to the tradition we are borrowing from?
Date: Tuesday, June 9, 2026 at 11:00 am EDT / 4:00 pm BST
Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/1yqE72w2Qe6fctkr4X5Uzw#/registration
Presenter Info
Leigh Leibel, MSc, PhD(c), is a clinician-researcher specializing in mind-body medicine and cancer survivorship. A former NIH/NCI fellow in cancer prevention and control, she holds an MSc in Yoga from S-VYASA University, Bengaluru—India's foremost yoga research institution—and is completing a PhD grounded in primary Sanskrit and Pali texts across the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, with advanced study at the University of Oxford's Centre for Hindu Studies. Since 2015, she has been affiliated with Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she designs and evaluates yoga interventions across all stages of cancer treatment and recovery. Her publications include Yoga Therapy Across the Cancer Care Continuum (2022), a textbook she co-edited, and chapters in Comprehensive Integrative Oncology (2026) and Yoga Therapy: Foundations, Tools, and Practice (2021).