How Meditation Reduces Pain
Time magazine this month previewed the results of an exciting study on the efficacy of mindfulness practice in pain management. The study by Dr. Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, will soon be published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Dr. Zeidan has studied mindfulness for 15 years and has observed improved health outcomes as a result.
"But what if this is all just a placebo?” he wondered. “What if people are reporting improvements in health and reductions in pain just because of meditation’s reputation as a health-promoting practice?” He wanted to find out, so he designed a trial that included a placebo group.[1]
In the study, one group was the control, one group received a placebo pain cream, one group learned a fake mindfulness practice, and the fourth group learned real mindfulness techniques.
“People in all of the groups had greater pain reductions than the control group. The placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by an average of 11% and emotional unpleasantness of pain by 13%. For the sham mindfulness group, those numbers were 9% and 24% respectively. But mindfulness meditation outperformed them all. In this group, pain intensity was cut by 27% and emotional pain reduced by 44%.”[2]
Considering that opioid morphine reduces physical pain by 22%, the mindfulness numbers are impressive, indeed. But Dr. Zeidan was even more surprised by the MRI results, which showed that the mindfulness practitioners appeared to be using different brain regions than the other groups to reduce pain.
“There was something more active, we believe, going on with the genuine mindfulness meditation group,” Zeidan says. This group had increased activation in higher-order brain regions associated with attention control and enhanced cognitive control, he says, while exhibiting a deactivation of the thalamus—a structure that acts as the gatekeeper for pain to enter the brain, he explains. “We haven’t seen that with any other technique before.”[3]
As a mindfulness practitioner, I’m not surprised to hear this news, but I’m delighted to see good studies supporting what many of us have experienced. I look forward to upcoming studies that will help us to understand more about the process and under what circumstances mindfulness practice can be of most benefit to pain sufferers.Peace,Dr. Pamm [1] Mandy Oaklander, “Meditation Reduces Emotional Pain by 44%: Study,” Time, Nov. 12, 2015. [2] Ibid.[3] Ibid.