With Yoga, News Anchor Wins Battle Against Pain and Pills

Six years ago, Anita Lopez graced the KUSA-9News anchor desk to deliver the week’s top headlines. However, when two devastating injuries left her with chronic back pain that rendered her unable to sit in a chair, Anita found herself pulled out of the news world and faced with dramatic story of her own: a downward-spiraling painkiller addiction.

According to The Denver Post, after trying traditional physical therapies — traction, massage, strength training — without finding relief for her chronic back pain, Lopez turned to the only pain relief she could find: the medicine cabinet.

It wasn’t until CNN covered Rush Limbaugh’s prescription-drug-abuse story that Lopez realized she had a problem. 

“I immediately went to the medicine cabinet and realized I was taking more painkillers than Rush did,” Lopez explains to The Denver Post.

The wake-up call motivated Lopez to battle her addiction, turning away from the pills and heading for a healthy, balanced alternative instead, using yoga as therapy for back pain. She had practiced yoga before, but had gotten away from it. Now, with the help of regular yoga classes, Lopez not only overcame her drug addiction, but also restored her body into a healthy, naturally pain-free state. By taking two yoga classes six to seven days a week, Lopez was able to grow out of the downward spiral she had been stuck in and triumph over both pills and pain.

Like so many people before her, the experience of how effectively yoga helped her back pain prompted Lopez to take up a new career path: teaching yoga. Under the business name Anita Yoga, she now offers Yoga at Work classes to businesses, teaching courses in 12-week sessions covered by the company, employee, or a combination of both.

According to Lopez, large corporations like Nike, Forbes, Apple and other Fortune 500 companies have been providing onsite yoga for years, with fruitful benefits to the individual participants and company as a whole.