Chronic health problems, by definition, don’t go away quickly (or at all). And when we can’t help patients heal, the next best thing might be helping them cope. Enter mindfulness meditation. Jillian Simpson, RN, and Tim Mapel, senior lecturer at New Zealand’s Eastern Institute of Technology, wanted to find out whether mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) could help patients cope with chronic disease. So they recruited 29 participants suffering from chronic conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, IBS, and arthritis. Researchers randomly assigned participants to one of two groups – a treatment group that received MBSR training over eight weeks or…

Is mindfulness effective with chronic pain? Many practitioners asked this question in a recent survey. They also wanted to know how they could convince their skeptical clients to give mindfulness a try. The connection between mindfulness and healing emotional pain, like stress or anxiety, may make more sense to your patients. But physical pain? That’s a big leap. Dr. Natalia Morone and a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburg addresses both patient compliance and chronic pain in a study published in the Journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain. The study looks at the feasibility…

What if we could replace morphine and other pain-relieving drugs with meditation? Fadal Zeidan, PhD from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center recently conducted a study in which he found that a form of mindfulness meditation, known as focused attention, drastically diminished subjects’ experience of pain. In previous findings morphine has been shown to reduce pain by about 25%. In this study, meditation lessened pain by about 40%. Dr. Zeidan’s study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. He took 15 healthy volunteers, who had no meditation experience, and had them attend four, 20 minute sessions where they learned the…

Have you ever had an ache that’s barely noticeable, until you start to think about it? Then the ache intensified and suddenly, the pain seems unbearable. New studies have found that while pain isn’t “just all in your head,” the brain does have ways of influencing our perception of pain. In a new paper out of Biology Psychiatry, Chantal Berna, MD led a group of researchers from the University of Oxford, UK who looked at the effects that depression had on the perception of pain. 20 healthy volunteers listened to depressing music and were bombarded with negative thoughts. Researchers then…

Here are some important things you may not know about chronic pain: • According to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, people who have fibromyalgia are 3.4 times more likely to develop major depression than individuals without fibromyalgia. • Most people with fibromyalgia are women (Female: Male ratio 7:1). However, men and children also can have the disorder. (National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention) • Though arthritis is often thought to be more common among older patients, nearly two-thirds of arthritis patients are younger than 65. (The National Arthritis Action Plan) • Over half of adults…

Have you ever had pain that you couldn’t explain? As I’m getting (slightly) older, I have more random pain that just seems to appear on its own. And while I do expect some unexplained aches and pains, many people have pain that isn’t related to the aging process – yet their doctors are unable to locate the source of the pain or to provide treatment that brings adequate relief. The less diligent doctor will stop at this point and say that the pain is “all in the patient’s head,” while the better doctors will look further for both the causes…