The idea of standing stark naked in a little booth soaking up UV light three times a week doesn’t seem all that bad as medical treatments go, especially since it can help ameliorate psoriasis, an itchy, scaly, disfiguring skin disease.
But many people do find the experience stressful, which is why meditation guru Jon Kabat-Zinn wanted to see if calming the mind during treatments might speed healing of the body.
In a randomized study of 37 psoriasis patients published last month, Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist who heads the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at UMass Memorial Health Care, found that patients who listened to relaxation tapes healed 3.8 times faster than those who didn’t.
The tapes taught patients breathing and “mindfulness,” the Buddhist practice of moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. The UMass study is part of an emerging body of research that could provide new evidence for the idea that meditation has real – and beneficial – effects on mind and body.
But just how real and beneficial? That remains to be seen.
There’s no question that many people swear by meditation, defined as a mental technique that focuses attention on a word, sound, image, or repetitive process like breathing, and that the notion of the mind healing the body has huge intuitive appeal.
There’s also no question that a number of studies show people report that meditation “leads to a reduction in anxiety and unhappiness,” says psychologist Richard Davidson, who directs the Brain Imaging and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.
What’s not known, he says, is to what extent these changes in mood “are associated with changes in brain function that have consequences for health and disease.”
In fact, there are many “leaps of logic” from saying that a mental technique can reduce stress to documenting long-term physical changes, says medical sociologist Barrie Cassileth, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina.
For instance, some studies suggest meditation can change scores on some tests of immune function. But many of these changes “are so trivial and so transient they could not possibly have the benefits people ascribe to them,” she says.
Still, there’s a growing push by brain researchers, who once focused primarily on intellectual processes, to understand the underlying biology of emotions, specifically the patterns of brain activity in various emotional states.
In Wisconsin, Davidson and Dr. Ned Kalin, a psychiatrist, have been trying to link the positive emotional states associated with meditation – calmness and optimism – to brain wave patterns, using EEGs (electroencephalographs) and imaging techniques called PET and functional MRI.
In Rhesus monkeys, they have found that fearful monkeys show more activity in the right pre-frontal cortex of the brain than calmer monkeys, which show more activity in the left. The calm monkeys with more left pre-frontal activity also exhibit another measure of decreased stress: lower levels of two stress hormones, cortisol and CRH, or corticotropin-releasing hormone.
In humans, they’ve found that people who are calm, happy, and tend to recover from stress quickly also, like the monkeys, show more activity in the left pre-frontal cortex, while those who report more negative emotions show more activity on the right.
And these patterns are stable – if you show one pattern today, you’ll probably show the same pattern a month from now.
So the big question is, if you have the “bad” pattern, can you change it? And if so, how? With drugs? With meditation?
In monkey studies, the Wisconsin group has shown that the sedative Valium shifts brain waves from the more agitated to the calmer pattern. Studies from other labs suggest that medications, including Prozac-like anti-depressants (which also work against anxiety) can also trigger increases in left pre-frontal brain activity.
There’s also evidence from other labs that brainwave biofeedback (a nondrug technique that uses monitoring devices to teach people to control their brainwaves) can shift the pattern from the right to the left side.
To see if meditation can also shift brain patterns in a favorable direction, the Wisconsin team studied employees from a high-tech firm, measuring brain waves, cardiovascular and immune function, then giving the volunteers an 8-week course that includes meditation taught by Kabat-Zinn.
The volunteers were then retested and compared to people who were on a waiting list for the training. The study, still being finished, isn’t perfect: Even if there are changes, researchers won’t know if they’re due to meditation, to the group discussions or something else.
But if it turns out that the first volunteers do show changes that the waiting-list group does not, the study could provide the most tantalizing evidence yet that meditation works.
And that would fit with what Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has been saying for years about the “relaxation response,” which he defines as meditation, yoga, prayer, even repetitive exercise like jogging.
Though Benson’s research has drawn fire from some other scientists over the years, he remains convinced that, “regardless of the technique involved,” the relaxation response leads to decreases in breathing and heart rates, blood pressure, and responsivity to norepinephrine, a stress hormone.
And two years ago, in a published study of 20 first-time meditators, Benson and a colleague, research psychologist Gregg Jacobs, asked some of the same questions the Wisconsin team had asked.
In that study, the Boston team showed that brain waves recorded via computerized EEGs change in specific ways – toward less arousal and greater calm – when people listen to relaxation tapes, but not when they listen to “sham” relaxation tapes that do not teach people how to meditate but just extoll meditation’s virtues. This is strong evidence, says Jacobs, that the changes are not due to the placebo effect (expectations of benefit) but to the relaxation response specifically.
Other researchers are also trying to pin down specific effects of meditation, among them psychologist Zindel Segal at the University of Toronto.
In a still-unpublished study of 140 patients, he’s found that an 8-week course of meditation along with cognitive behavior therapy – learning to re-interpret stressful thoughts – can reduce the rate of relapse among people who have been treated for depression. (Other studies have already shown that cognitive behavior therapy alone can help with anxiety and depression.)
Tantalizing as all this is, there is still no proof that meditation acts on the brain to influence health in measurable ways. That means you can’t assume that “if you meditate and calm your mind, you can promote the body’s ability to heal itself,” says Cassileth. “We don’t know if this is true.”
But as long as you don’t eschew medical care for a serious health problem, there’s probably little harm in trying meditation. And if you’re stressed and unhappy, it can help.
Just don’t expect miracles. As Cassileth puts it: “This sense that we can conquer everything with our minds is, unfortunately, just not true.”
Some tips to get you started
There are many approaches to meditation, so if you’re interested it pays to read books and sample meditation tapes to learn what appeals to you. Some other tips:
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To find organizations that offer courses, look under “meditation instruction” in the Yellow Pages.
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If you want to learn meditation outside a religious or spiritual context, call a major hospital. Many offer meditation or relaxation courses.
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If a course seems too cult-like, trust your instincts and go elsewhere. You do not have to do or believe anything that doesn’t fit with your value system.
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If you have serious mental health or medical problems, see your doctor. Don’t expect meditation to be a cure-all.
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Remember that there are many ways to achieve relaxation, from meditation to jogging to doing crossword puzzles or going to the movies. Meditation is far from the only way.
There are numerous books on meditation. Among them:
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“The Relaxation Response,” by Dr. Herbert Benson. (William Morris & Co.)
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“The Wellness Book,” by Dr. Herbert Benson, Eileen Stuart and others. (Simon & Schuster.)
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“It’s Easier Than You Think,” by Sylvia Boorstein (Harper Collins).
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“Minding the Body, Mending the Mind,” by Joan Borysenko. (Addison Wesley.)
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“The Miracle of Meditation: A Manual on Meditation,” by T.N. Hanh. (Beacon Press.)
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“Full Catastrophe Living,” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. (Dell Publishing.)
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“Wherever You Go There You Are,” by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Hyperion.)
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“A Path With a Heart,” by Jack Kornfield (Bantam.)
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“How to Meditate,” by Larry Leshan. (Bantam.)