Child’s Pose in the ER: What We Found Interesting About This Case Study

In this episode of Yoga Research and Beyond, Ariana and I talked about a paper that’s unusual in that it focuses on a single yoga pose.

Not a yoga program.
Not a multi-week intervention.
Just Child’s Pose.

The paper is titled Yoga in the Emergency Room: Termination of SVT with the Child’s Pose, published in Oxford Medical Case Reports in 2025. It’s a case study out of London describing a 27-year-old woman with supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), which is a type of arrhythmia where the heart rate suddenly jumps very high, often into the 150-250 beats per minute range.

What makes this case compelling is that this woman discovered, on her own, that Child’s Pose reliably brought her heart rate back down. She figured this out years earlier, as a teenager, and had been using it consistently long before this paper was written. The authors documented what happened when she had an SVT episode in the emergency room, was hooked up to an ECG, and then performed Child’s Pose.

Her heart rate dropped from 176 beats per minute to 107 in about 20-30 seconds. The ECG confirmed the change before and after. At the time of the paper, she was using Child’s Pose instead of medication or other interventions that require medical staff to step in.

That alone is pretty striking. But what Ariana and I kept circling around wasn’t just the result. I was everything around it.

How She Did Child’s Pose Matters

One of the first things I did after reading the paper was watch the video the authors included. They recorded her performing the pose in real time, with the heart rate data visible alongside it.

And the pose itself is worth talking about.

Her knees were wide.
Her pelvis stayed slightly elevated on her heels.
Her chest angled down between her thighs.
Her arms reached forward.

She wasn’t curled tightly. She wasn’t resting her head the entire time. In fact, she kept lifting her head to look at the monitor, which makes sense if you’re watching your heart rate drop in real time.

This immediately raised questions for me. Not in a critical way, but in a very practical, yoga-teacher way.

Does the head need to be down?
Does knee flexion matter?
What if someone can’t sit back on their heels?
What if they use a bolster or blocks?

When we say “Child’s Pose,” we’re actually talking about a wide range of shapes. And if anyone were to try to study this more formally, they’d have to decide what version of the pose counts.

That’s one of the inherent challenges with pose-based research. Bodies differ. Setups differ. Experiences differ. And once you start standardizing everything, you’re no longer studying what people actually do in the real world.

Is This Yoga, or Is It Just Position?

Another part of the paper that caught our attention was how the authors framed their discussion. They cite research showing that yoga can reduce heart rate, blood pressure, and stress in people with arrhythmias.

But when you look closely at those citations, they’re mostly studies of yoga programs or classes, not studies of individual poses.

And that distinction matters.

Because what’s doing the work here?

Is it yoga as a practice?
Is it breathing?
Is it attention and familiarity?
Is it the mechanical position of the body?
Is it years of self-experimentation and learning what works for her?

Yoga research often bundles all of these things together. When a paper says “yoga has been shown to…,” it’s easy to assume that a specific posture is responsible, when in reality the intervention might be a whole class, practiced over weeks or months, in a social and supportive environment.

This case study is interesting precisely because it doesn’t fit neatly into that model. It’s one person. One shape. One very consistent response. And it doesn’t tell us why it works. Just that, for her, it does.

Why Case Studies Are Still Worth Reading

From a research hierarchy standpoint, case studies sit pretty low. There’s no control group. No statistics to run. No claims about generalizability.

But Ariana and I both felt that dismissing this paper because of that would miss the point.

What a case study gives you is depth. Context. A real-world situation playing out in real time.

In this case, the real-world impact is significant. This woman turned down medication. She turned down cardiac ablation, a procedure that intentionally damages heart tissue, because she has a reliable way to regulate her heart rate herself.

If you ran a large randomized trial on Child’s Pose and SVT, that kind of individual response might get averaged out. You’d be looking for overall trends, effect sizes, and probabilities. But those averages don’t tell you much about the person sitting in front of you.

For this individual, the effect isn’t subtle. It’s immediate and meaningful. And that’s something case studies are uniquely good at capturing.

What We’re Left Thinking About

This paper doesn’t tell yoga teachers what to prescribe. It doesn’t suggest protocols. And it definitely doesn’t mean Child’s Pose is a treatment for SVT.

But it does raise questions that feel very aligned with how yoga teachers actually work.

How do people learn to self-regulate?
How much variability matters?
What gets lost when we only look at averages?
And how often do meaningful outcomes happen outside the structures that research is designed to measure?

One of the things Ariana mentioned toward the end of the episode was how empowering it felt that this woman had options. She wasn’t trapped into a single medical pathway. She had a choice, and she understood her own body well enough to make it.

That doesn’t come from a protocol. It comes from experience.

Case studies like this don’t give us answers so much as they give us better questions. And they often point toward areas where more research could happen, even if it never does.

For us, this one was a reminder that research doesn’t only live at the top of the hierarchy. Sometimes it starts with paying attention to what people are already doing and taking that seriously.

If you want to hear the full conversation, including our discussion about research design, generalizability, and why single cases can still matter, you can listen to Episode 79 of Yoga Research and Beyond.