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 […]
Meditation or Morphine?
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, Brain, and Depression: It isn’t all in your head…or in your body
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 […]
6 Facts about Chronic Pain
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 […]
Chronic Pain and Mind-Body Medicine: A Classic Pairing?
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 […]