Prince Charles advises people recovering from Covid to practise yoga
Prince Charles has suggested that people struggling to return to full health after having the coronavirus should practise yoga.
In a video statement on Friday to the virtual yoga and healthcare symposium Wellness After Covid, the heir apparent said doctors should work together with “complementary healthcare specialists” to “build a roadmap to hope and healing” after Covid.
“This pandemic has emphasised the importance of preparedness, resilience and the need for an approach which addresses the health and welfare of the whole person as part of society, and which does not merely focus on the symptoms alone,” Charles said.
“As part of that approach, therapeutic, evidenced-informed yoga can contribute to health and healing. By its very nature, yoga is an accessible practice which provides practitioners with ways to manage stress, build resilience and promote healing.”
The prince said those attending the symposium shared an ambition “to help those for whom the mental anguish and physical challenges of long Covid have been devastating”.
He added: “When we work together with a common interest we can build on each other’s ideas and, perhaps, build a roadmap to hope and healing.”
Speaking to attendees at the event co-organised by the Yoga In Healthcare Alliance and the Give Back Yoga Foundation, the Prince of Wales also acknowledged his own brush with Covid in March last year, saying: “I seem to have got away with it quite lightly … unfortunately, that is not the case for millions of people in the UK and across the globe.”
Dr Adrian James, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who is giving a talk at the event titled “The Unseen Crisis: Mental Health Consequences of a Global Pandemic and How Yoga Can Help”, said yoga, group gardening, art classes and other physical activities and training courses improve patients’ physical and mental wellbeing.
“It’s vital for services to be evenly available across the country, and that social prescribing [referring people to non-clinical activities] is made available in community and inpatient mental health services and not limited to primary care only,” he told the Guardian.
James added: “Social prescribing is used to complement existing treatments and not as a substitute for talking therapies or medical interventions.”
Charles, who has previously espoused the benefits of yoga, is not the only fan in the royal family. His wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, has said “it makes you less stiff” and “more supple”, while Prince William has also been pictured doing yogic poses.
In 2019, the Prince of Wales said yoga had “proven beneficial effects on both body and mind”, and delivered “tremendous social benefits” that help build “discipline, self-reliance and self-care”.