So far, more than 20 people have participated, out of a pool of 40 that Ridner hopes to recruit. Though the study is not scheduled to end until July 31, Ridner is encouraged by the changes she’s seeing in patients. “They walk better,” she said. “They’re standing up straighter. They say hi when they see people and they have a smile on their face that they literally didn’t have when they first came in the door.” Michael Walsh, a neck cancer survivor who is finished with his part in the study but continues to practice yoga, said he’s much improved. He’s resumed playing ice hockey on weekends, something he had to give up after the cancer treatments rendered him unable. “It feels a lot better, and I know that because I’m not getting my headaches that I used to get,” he said. Ridner is closely measuring the effectiveness of each yoga position, and combinations of positions. Her hope is that this is one step toward a more comprehensive study that will lead to targeted yoga therapies that patients can do at home. She emphasized that the postures are carefully chosen and are safe, and haven’t resulted in injury. This isn’t group yoga or hot yoga, which is practiced in a room heated to about 105 degrees. Ridner has been passionate about head and neck patients since she treated them as a bedside nurse in the late 1970s. She said that often, lymphedema sufferers are either not diagnosed or asked to live with their conditions until they get much worse. “These may be things that we can fix,” she said. “It’s not like you just have to accept that people have to be impaired after having head and neck cancer. We don’t have to accept that for them. We do not have to accept that’s just what happens.” The study is being funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the Martha Rivers Ingram Chair in Nursing and the School of Nursing.