Meditation has been extensively studied for its effects of stress reduction and other clinical functions, and there have been several preliminary studies in its potential as a pain relief treatment. Now researchers at Wake Forest have published a study measuring the physical effects of meditation on pain — and it turns out it might be more effective than opiates.
“This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
“We found a big effect – about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent.”
For the study, 15 healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. Focused attention is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.
Both before and after meditation training, study participants' brain activity was examined using a special type of imaging — arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) — that captures longer duration brain processes, such as meditation, better than a standard MRI scan of brain function. During these scans, a pain-inducing heat device was placed on the participants' right legs. This device heated a small area of their skin to 120° Fahrenheit, a temperature that most people find painful, over a 5-minute period.
The scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant's pain ratings were reduced, with decreases ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Zeidan said.
I love this kind of research. I don't think that progess be defined as genetic engineering, pharmaceuticals, robots, and flying cars. I'm excited at the myriad means in which ancient techniques for a variety of things are being revived in a modern context and given the due scientific investigation and validation they deserve. I think there's a rich area for research into improving people's lives by studying the practices of our ancestors and refining those practices with some of the modern tools at our disposal.
