Pain Management…
Alleviating pain with mindfulness meditation
Studies support that mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce pain and can be an effective way to alleviate chronic pain. This particular study on back pain funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed that mindfulness meditation can relieve chronic pain even more effectively than standard treatments. “Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment,” explains Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D who has conducted studies on the relationship between mindfulness, meditation and pain management.
“We now know that some people are more mindful than others, and those people seemingly feel less pain,” says Zeidan. You can read the findings of the studies which support their conclusions in the research paper titled Neural mechanisms supporting the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and pain.
“It is vital that we identify effective non-pharmacological treatment options for 25 million people who suffer from daily pain in the US,” said Josephine Briggs, M.D., director of NCCIH. “The results from this research affirm that non-drug/non-opioid therapies, such as meditation, can help manage chronic low-back pain. Physicians and their patients can use this information to inform treatment decisions.”
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Altering pain experience with mindfulness meditation
In a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study the results showed that after four days of mindfulness meditation training, meditating in the presence of noxious stimulation significantly reduced pain unpleasantness by 57% and pain intensity ratings by 40% when compared to rest.
Meditation-induced reductions in pain intensity ratings were associated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, areas involved in the cognitive regulation of nociceptive (relating to the perception or sensation of pain) processing. Reductions in pain unpleasantness ratings were associated with orbitofrontal cortex activation, an area implicated in reframing the contextual evaluation of sensory events. Moreover, reductions in pain unpleasantness also were associated with thalamic deactivation, which may reflect a limbic gating mechanism involved in modifying interactions between afferent input and executive-order brain areas.
Fine but what does that mean? The test data indicates that meditation engages multiple brain mechanisms that alter the construction of the subjectively available pain experience from afferent information.
The bottom line supports that there is evidence that meditation works to help control even chronic pain.
Photo: Erik Brolin
Meditation reduces pain and stress… and it changes your brain
Neuroscientist Sara Lazar, of Massachusetts General and Harvard Medical School, got into yoga after sustaining running injuries training for the Boston Marathon. Yoga eventually led to also exploring the science around mindfulness meditation where she found ever-increasing evidence to support that meditation reduces pain and insomnia, decreases stress, depression and anxiety and at the same time increases one’s quality of life.
Lazar decided to conduct her own neuroscience research into meditation. In her first study, she looked at long-term meditators with seven to nine years experience versus a control group. The results showed those with a strong meditation background had increased gray matter in several areas of the brain… The study also showed that the 50-year-old meditators had the same amount of gray matter as those half their age, which the researchers deemed to be remarkable.
Read Business Insider article on Sara Lazar’s study.
Read the first full study… and the second study conducted by Lezar and her team published on US National Library of Medicine/ National Institutes of Health website
Photo by Francisco Moreno
Treating Chronic Pain With Meditation
“In some cases, the holistic practice could replace narcotics.”
In this excerpt from The Atlantic the subject of the article, Sarah Kehoe had massive suffering with a herniated disc…
She had tried Aleve for her back pain. She tried stretching. She tried yoga. She tried forgetting about it. She tried pain patches. She tried acupuncture. A shot of painkillers into her back. Prescription anti-inflammatory pain patches. Opiates. Surgery. Physical therapy. Heat and compresses. Ignoring it again. Steroids. More opiates. Acupuncture again. She couldn’t sit, stand up straight, lie down on her back. She was weak, had lost muscle tone. She fainted on the subway. An otherwise healthy 36-year-old woman, Kehoe, a former high school and college athlete, a yogi of 10 years, was falling apart.
After two surgeries, and with a third surgery no longer being an option her last resort was a meditation course. Although anecdotal, Sarah’s story gives hope and supports the hypothesis put forth by Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D concerning pain being manageable with meditation. His studies, in fact show an approximately 40% reduction in pain intensity ratings during meditation when compared with non-meditation.
Read more in this article on why Zeidan feels that meditation can be a major component in successfully managing chronic pain. “It worked for beginners,… It seems a patient does not need to be a zen master of 10 years to reap the rewards of the practice.” says Zeidan.
Photo by Matthew Henry