NEW YORK -- A lot of our life is spent sitting down -- in the car, at work, and watching TV at home. But when you sit, you put pressure on the discs in your spine. That reduces the blood flow and nutrition to the discs, making you more susceptible to pain and injury.

Doctors have prescribed bed rest, exercise, physical therapy, painkillers, anti-inflammatory medications, and even surgery to relieve the pain. But a New York doctor is now studying a treatment that has been around for thousands of years.

"What I've noticed, people, especially in the Eastern cultures, have very little low back problems. And I started investigating into why and realized there was a lot of incorporation of yoga into their culture and I thought maybe we could bring that concept to the West," Dr. Vijay Vad said.

Vad is conducting a study to see which works best for lower back pain: yoga or prescription painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs. After three months, almost twice the patients doing yoga felt better than the patients taking medicine.

Michelle Ruggieri is one of Vad's patients. She has a herniated disc and arthritis of the spine.

"I have a stabbing pain in my lower right side and just general pain in my lower back. And it hurts every day," Ruggieri said.

Yoga has made a major difference in her pain.

"On a scale of one to 10, it was probably a nine, at times a stabbing pain of 10. Now, I would say it's about four to five," Ruggieri said.

"This is very different from regular yoga. We've taken out a lot of the traditional yoga postures, which really put tremendous pressures on the disc," Vad said.

Along with yoga expert Jennifer Walker, Vad's created a program that can best be called "medical yoga."

"Dr. Vad and I modified a lot of the poses so that they were easy and accessible for people with back pain," Walker said.

"The more flexible you are, the less pressure on the disc and eventually it's building abdominal strength. The greater strength you have on the abdominals, the less pressure on the disc," Vad said.