Mindfulness meditation reduces pain: Study
Mindfulness meditation can bring greater pain relief than a placebo, according to research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The findings, by scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC, are the first to show that patterns of brain activity produced by mindfulness meditation differ from those produced by a placebo cream.
Contemplatives have long reported the benefits of mindfulness meditation on pain, and brain imaging technology has revealed more about the mechanisms involved. Whether the benefits stem from religious practices or mindfulness itself has remained unclear.
Meditation-related pain reduction is now a rapidly emerging field, but more specific experimental evidence has been needed to advance it.
Lead author Fadel Zaidan, PhD, and colleagues have previously noted the effect of expectation, distraction, attention, beliefs, placebo, hypnosis, stress, anxiety, mood and emotional state on pain. Enhanced cognitive and emotional control have
been shown to help decrease pain; mindfulness could play a role.
Humans automatically tend to perceive momentary experience as lasting; by reframing this perception, mindfulness can help reduce discomfort.
Different meditative practices can be termed mindfulness, but two broad categories encompass them: focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM).
FA is associated with maintaining focus on a specific object, say, flow of the breath or an external object. OM involves a non-directed acknowledgment of any sensory, emotional or cognitive event that arises in the mind, as in Zen meditation.
Mindfulness meditation has been found to improve a range of cognitive and health outcomes, including anxiety, depression and stress. It is associated with enhanced cognitive control, emotion regulation, positive mood and acceptance, each of which has been linked with pain modulation.
The current study takes a step toward isolating the active ingredients of meditation, using 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 (relaxation), placebo analgesic cream (petroleum jelly) or control.
Pain was induced by using a thermal probe to heat a small area of the skin to 120.2 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Centigrade) - a level of heat most people find very painful.
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