Why Medical Grade Meditation?

The popularity of meditation is increasing as more people discover its numerous health benefits.

There are many studies that are looking at how meditation can help with various conditions, such as certain psychological disorders, high blood pressure, pain… There are also numerous studies where researchers are looking on how constant meditations affect the brain.

Research has shown that mindfulness meditation reduces levels of stress hormones produced by your body and help to reduce stress levels, which translates to less anxiety. Also, some research suggest that meditation may also improve symptoms of stress-related conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, and fibromyalgia.

Meditation is also proven to improve your immune system, reduce inflammatory disorders and asthma, help manage blood pressure, and increase longevity. Studies have shown that meditation reduces the risk of heart diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and arthritis.

Some forms of meditation can lead to improved self-image and a more positive outlook on life. Research has confirmed in a variety of studies that mindfulness meditation improves symptoms of depression and decrease levels of inflammatory chemicals, called cytokines, which are released in response to stress and can affect the mood.

 Source: Healthline , NCCIH

Meditation makes you stronger against pain

Chronic pain affects more than 100 million Americans, costing more than $635 billion a year, according to a 2017 study. The perception of pain is connected to person’s state of mind, and it can be elevated in stressful conditions.

There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that mindfulness can be effective in the treatment of chronic pain. Many studies have independently examined the effectiveness of mindfulness in pain reduction, the neurological effects of mindfulness, and the neurophysiology of pain. The 2012 NHIS of 34,525 Americans found that 63.6 percent of the people who used meditation reported that it helped them a great deal.

For example, one review of 38 studies concluded that mindfulness meditation could reduce pain, improve quality of life, and decrease symptoms of depression in people with chronic pain. A large meta-analysis of studies enrolling nearly 3,500 participants concluded that meditation was associated with decreased pain.

Mindfulness meditation engages multiple unique brain mechanisms that attenuate the subjective experience of pain. For example, Dr. Grant in his research was examining cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in Zen meditators and used structural MRI scans to assess the results. Compared with control subjects, the meditators had a decreased sensitivity to pain, which was associated with significantly thicker dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and significantly thicker secondary somatosensory cortex. These results suggest that long-term mindfulness practice may affect cortical thickness in pain-related brain areas, thus causing changes in pain sensitivity

Sources: Healthline, AJOP, NCBI, JNeurosci

When taking into consideration the current chronic pain and opioid epidemic, the use of mind–body approaches, such as mindfulness meditation, may prove to be an important resource to teach patients to self-regulate their respective experience of pain directly with a present-centered and acceptance-based focus.

Meditation can increase awareness of your own thoughts helping you recognize your own behaviors, it can help you manage cravings for opioids, control your emotions, and even train your brain to accept physical discomfort.

For example, a research of Dr. Garland published in 2019, shows that mindfulness practice in combination with methadone (a common medication used to treat opioid addiction) reduced cravings, negative feelings of pain, and stress compared to methadone alone in patients with opioid addiction and pain.

Dr. Fadel Zeidan is a big name when it comes to research on meditation and pain. For example, in an experiment conducted by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, 15 healthy volunteers, who were new to meditation, attended four 20-minute classes to learn meditation, focusing on the breath. Both before and after meditation training, study participants’ brain activity was examined using ASL MRI, while pain was inflicted in them by using heat.

Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study, explains that that “only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation. (…) We found a big effect – about a 40% reduction in pain intensity and a 57% 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%.”

Worth reading are a few newers studies from 2018 and 2019, where Dr. Zeidan examines the neural mechanisms of mindfulness-based pain relief and neural mechanisms supporting the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and pain. These novel findings demonstrate that mindful individuals feel less pain and evoke greater deactivation of brain regions supporting the engagement sensory, cognitive, and affective appraisals.

Source: NCBI, GoodRX, ScienceDaily, ZeidanLab