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Mindfulness meditation trumps placebo in pain reduction

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Press release, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center: Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found new evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo.

This is significant because placebo-controlled trials are the recognized standard for demonstrating the efficacy of clinical and pharmacological treatments.

The research, published in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that study participants who practiced mindfulness meditation reported greater pain relief than placebo. Significantly, brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation produced very different patterns of activity than those produced by placebo to reduce pain.

“We were completely surprised by the findings,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and lead investigator of the study. “While we thought that there would be some overlap in brain regions between meditation and placebo, the findings from this study provide novel and objective evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain in a unique fashion.”

The study used a two-pronged approach – pain ratings and brain imaging – to determine whether mindfulness meditation is merely a placebo effect. Seventy-five healthy, pain-free participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: mindfulness meditation, placebo meditation (“sham” meditation), placebo analgesic cream (petroleum jelly) or control.

Pain was induced by using a thermal probe to heat a small area of the participants’ skin to 49 degrees Centigrade (120.2 degrees Fahrenheit), a level of heat most people find very painful. Study participants then rated pain intensity (physical sensation) and pain unpleasantness (emotional response). The participants’ brains were scanned with arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) before and after their respective four-day group interventions.

The mindfulness meditation group reported that pain intensity was reduced by 27 percent and by 44 percent for the emotional aspect of pain. In contrast, the placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by 11 percent and emotional aspect of pain by 13 percent.

“The MRI scans showed for the first time that mindfulness meditation produced patterns of brain activity that are different than those produced by the placebo cream,” Zeidan said.

Mindfulness meditation reduced pain by activating brain regions (orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex) associated with the self-control of pain while the placebo cream lowered pain by reducing brain activity in pain-processing areas (secondary somatosensory cortex).

Another brain region, the thalamus, was deactivated during mindfulness meditation, but was activated during all other conditions. This brain region serves as a gateway that determines if sensory information is allowed to reach higher brain centers. By deactivating this area, mindfulness meditation may have caused signals about pain to simply fade away, Zeidan said.

Mindfulness meditation also was significantly better at reducing pain intensity and pain unpleasantness than the placebo meditation. The placebo-meditation group had relatively small decreases in pain intensity (9 percent) and pain unpleasantness (24 percent). The study findings suggest that placebo meditation may have reduced pain through a relaxation effect that was associated with slower breathing.

“This study is the first to show that mindfulness meditation is mechanistically distinct and produces pain relief above and beyond the analgesic effects seen with either placebo cream or sham meditation,” Zeidan said.

“Based on our findings, we believe that as little as four 20-minute daily sessions of mindfulness meditation could enhance pain treatment in a clinical setting. However, given that the present study examined healthy, pain-free volunteers, we cannot generalize our findings to chronic pain patients at this time.”

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This work was supported by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, R21-AT007247, F32-AT006949 and K99-AT008238; the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NS239426; the Mind and Life Institute Francisco J. Varela Award; and the Wake Forest Center for Integrative Medicine.

Co-authors are: Nichole M. Emerson, B.S., Suzan R. Farris, B.S., John G. McHaffie, Ph.D., and Youngkyoo Jung, Ph.D., of Wake Forest Baptist; Jenna N. Ray, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and Robert C. Coghill, Ph.D., of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

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Mindfulness and chronic pain: every moment is a new chance

Pain always seems worse at night. Something about the silence amplifies the suffering. Even after you’ve taken the maximum dose of painkillers, the aching soon returns with a vengeance. You want to do something, anything, to stop the pain, but whatever you try seems to fail. Moving hurts. Doing nothing hurts. Ignoring it hurts. But it’s not just the pain that hurts; your mind can start to suffer as you desperately try to find a way of escaping. Pointed and bitter questions can begin nagging at your soul: What will happen if I don’t recover? What if it gets worse? I can’t cope with this. Please, I just want it to stop. . . .

You Are Not Your Pain Vidyamala BurchWe wrote this book to help you cope with pain, illness, and stress in times such as these. It will teach you how to reduce your suffering progressively, so that you can begin living life to the fullest once again. It may not completely eliminate your suffering, but it will ensure that it no longer dominates your life. You’ll discover that it is possible to be at peace, even if illness and pain are unavoidable, and to enjoy a fulfilling life.

We know this to be true because we have both experienced terrible injuries and used an ancient form of meditation known as mindfulness to ease our suffering. The techniques in this book have been proven to work by doctors and scientists in universities around the world. Mindfulness is so effective that doctors and specialist pain clinics now refer their patients to our Breathworks center in Manchester, UK, and to courses run by our affiliated trainers around the world. Every day we help people find peace amid their suffering.

This book and the accompanying CD reveal a series of simple practices that you can incorporate into daily life to significantly reduce your pain, anguish, and stress. They are built on Mindfulness-Based Pain Management (MBPM), which has its roots in the groundbreaking work of Dr. Jon  Kabat- Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The MBPM program itself was developed by Vidyamala Burch (coauthor of this book) as a means of coping with the after effects of two serious accidents. Although originally designed to reduce physical pain and suffering, it has proven to be an effective stress-reduction technique as well. The core mindfulness meditation techniques have been shown in many clinical trials to be at least as effective as drugs or counseling for relieving anxiety, stress, and depression.

When it comes to pain, clinical trials show that mindfulness can be as effective as the most commonly prescribed painkillers, and some studies have shown it to be as powerful as morphine. Imaging studies show that it soothes the brain patterns underlying pain, and over time, these changes take root and alter the structure of the brain itself so that you no longer feel pain with the same intensity. And when it does arise, the pain no longer dominates your life. Many people report that their pain declines to such a degree that they barely notice it at all.

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Pain entered my life unannounced — now, I manage chronic pain with mindfulness

Vidyamala Burch, Huffington Post: I am on more than nodding terms with chronic pain. I was 16 in 1976 when pain came into my life and basically took it over. Before the pain, I was a fit, sporty, young woman — I loved to be outside hiking in the awe-inspiring New Zealand hills. Being active, moving without having to think about it, and enjoying what my body could do were absolutely fundamentals in my life. Like most people, I took these things totally for granted.

My …

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Mindfulness-based techniques aim to help patients reduce stress, manage pain

wildmind meditation newsAJMC: If you have taken a yoga class, there was something familiar when Steven D. Hickman, PsyD, associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, invited a roomful of conference attendees to put down the notes, close their eyes, set an intention, and breathe, gaining an “awareness of the breath.”

Dr Hickman’s opening to the session, “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Patients with Chronic or Life-Threatening Illness,” highlighted the intuitive element of what he teaches: His techniques are based on 2000-year-old Eastern philosophy and can be done anywhere; it’s the hectic nature of Western culture that relegates them to classes or …

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Mindfulness: Week 8 – Your wild and precious life

John Alex Murphy, The Province: “Week Eight is the rest of your life!”

As I read this bold statement in the last chapter of my Mindfulness book, I was briefly taken aback, but then it made complete sense.

After all, my mindfulness meditation experiences over the past seven weeks have been amazing. I am now able to self-manage my thoughts and spend more time living mindfully in the present moment. As a result, I feel calm and more at peace with my life exactly as it is right now.

I have also discovered that mindfulness meditation is an extremely effective tool for self-managing my…

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Mindfulness: Finding peace in a frantic world in 8 weeks!

John Murphy, The Province: There’s great joy and peace to be realized if we live our lives mindfully in the present moment, rather than mentally in the past or the future. Awareness is the key to mindfulness, but it doesn’t come easily for most of us. It requires commitment, discipline, hard work and daily practice. Meditation is our practice – mindfulness is our reward.

I have certainly been fully committed, disciplined and have worked hard to rehabilitate and self-manage my chronic pain after my accident and head injury.

I have certainly been fully committed, disciplined and have worked hard to rehabilitate and self-manage…

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Inside the Pentagon’s alt-medicine Mecca, where the generals meditate

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Katie Drummond, Wired: The Samueli Institute gets $7.6 million a year from places like the Pentagon to investigate alternative therapies from yoga to acupuncture to water with a memory. But does any of it really work? And can Samueli, a convicted fraudster, really be trusted?

The general is surprisingly good at meditation. It’s not just the impeccable posture — that might be expected of a man long used to standing at attention. It’s his hands, which rest idly on his knees, and his combat boots, which remain planted firmly on the floor. Over the next several minutes, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Surgeon General of the Army, will keep his eyes closed and his face perfectly relaxed.

Few in this hotel conference room, where three dozen have assembled to mark the 10th anniversary of the Samueli Institute, a research organization specializing in alternative therapies, are able to match Schoomaker’s stillness.

Even as our first speaker implores that we “close [our] eyes … feel the chair, feel the air, feel the breath going in and out,” this motley crew of professors, bejeweled clairvoyants, military personnel and Einsteinian-haired futurists tap their toes, shuffle papers and ogle paper plates of fruit and croissants.

>This might be the Pentagon’s best chance at making alt-medicine work — or at least figuring out if it even stands a chance.

“Wherever you’ve come from, wherever you imagine you’re going, you’re actually only doing it right now, in this moment.” Our meditation guru for the day, Dr. Wayne Jonas, is not only a retired Army medical officer and former director of the holistic branch of the National Institute of Health. He’s also the leader of the organization we’ve met to celebrate.

Schoomaker is here because he has a health crisis on his hands. And he’s betting on guys like Jonas to help cope…

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Wildmind is a Community-Supported Meditation Initiative. Click here to find out about the many benefits of being a sponsor.

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Beyond standard pain relievers (Newswise)

oga, massage or plain old exercise? It could be just what the doctor ordered to minimize pain from chronic conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, neck pain, low back pain or fibromyalgia, according to the September issue of Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource.

Given recent news about the risk of some pain relieving medications, many people are considering other ways to manage chronic pain. While not a quick fix, therapies such as massage, ice, heat and even acupuncture can be very effective if you give them time to work and use them consistently.

The September issue of Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource explores alternative ways to manage chronic pain.

Exercise: Most people with chronic pain feel better if they are physically active every day. But don’t overdo. Exercising too much or too intensely can make pain worse.

Ice and heat: Applying ice or heat provides short-term pain relief. Ice reduces pain and swelling. Heat is useful for reducing joint stiffness and for muscle spasm, back pain and arthritis.

Acupuncture: Extremely thin needles inserted at one or more of about 350 strategic points on your body may relieve low back pain and pain from fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis.

Electrical stimulation: Electrically stimulating the nerves that control muscles is a safe, easy and effective way to control many types of pain. One example is transcutaneous electrical stimulation, where a small device directs mild electric pulses to nerve endings beneath the skin. A physical therapist can teach you how to do this therapy at home.

Relaxation: Meditation, deep breathing, guided visualization, biofeedback and self-hypnosis can reduce stress, pain, anxiety and depression.

Manual therapy and massage: Osteopathic doctors, physical therapists, chiropractors and massage therapists use various techniques to improve movement and function and relieve pain in muscles and joints.

Before you try alternative therapies, learn all you can about the safety and effectiveness. If nothing seems to work, talk to your doctor, who may refer you to a pain management program to suggest other ways to cope with long-term pain.

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