IT IS ALL IN THE MIND [Archive]

scsheorayan

August 4th, 2003, 05:04 PM

Extracts from the above article;

It shows Yoga is becoming increasingly main stream now.

Good thinking
July 24 2003

Photo: Cathryn Tremain

Meditation is playing an important role in modern medicine. Guy Allenby reports.

Until three years ago, Heidi Castro had suffered from "very, very intense" migraines that she'd put up with for about 10 years. She tried acupuncture and various pain-relief medications with mixed success, then she signed on to a migraine study at Sydney's Royal Hospital for Women.

As part of the study, Castro attended a meditation workshop every Tuesday and Thursday for three months and meditated for five minutes twice a day.

"The first month the migraines and the number of migraines were reduced," she says. "The following month they were reduced to about four in a month [10 was typical before the workshop], then after that I didn't have any."

She continued meditating for another two months and thought: "OK, I'm cured" and stopped. "I then started getting them back," she says. "So I started meditating again. It has helped permanently."

Dr Craig Hassed, a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Melbourne's Monash University, says: "Meditation is a great adjunct for a lot of things, from chronic pain to improving sleep, helping reduce blood pressure and coping with stress, anxiety and depression."

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At Monash, meditation is in the undergraduate curriculum for students, he says.

Research into meditation's physiological and therapeutic effects has turned up some impressive results, and increasingly the technique is seen to have a role to play in modern medicine.

For instance, a study of Australia's oncologists published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2000 found that 82 per cent of respondents believed relaxation, meditation and visual imagery therapies were "helpful" for palliative cancer patients (the figure was 69 per cent for patients on the mend).

A University of Melbourne survey published the same year found that 80 per cent of Victorian GPs had referred patients for complementary therapies, with acupuncture, hypnosis and meditation considered the most effective.

At the Pain Management Centre at Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, patients are taught "mindfulness" meditation to manage their chronic pain. Tony Merritt, the centre's clinical psychologist, says they use it as part of their program "to help people think about their pain differently", saying that meditation helps patients to see that pain is something "you don't have to be afraid of and is something that you can live with and cope with".

The method of meditation used at the centre is based on Buddhist teachings and was developed in the United States by Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, emeritus professor of medicine and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts medical school.

"You meditate on your breathing and you watch what comes into your mind," says Merritt. "What people see is that they have the pain . . . and then there's a whole lot of other stuff around it - fear of the pain, distress.

"What they get to see is that the fear and the distress are actually separate [from the pain].What it can also tell people is that they are not their pain. And I think that's a real problem for people with chronic pain, because it becomes their life."

Meditation can take many forms, either attached to a spiritual tradition or practised as pure method. It typically includes techniques such as "watching" the breath, concentrating "one-pointedly" on something (a sound, an object), visualisations, repeating a mantra or observing or being "mindful" of your thoughts without "following" or being swept up in them.

Overseas, the early results of clinical research into those adept at meditation are, as one scientist has put it, tantalising.

The University of Wisconsin's Dr Richard Davidson has tested the brainwaves of meditating Buddhist monks, with extraordinary results. Testing the abbott of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India with an electroencephalograph, Davidson discovered more activity in the area of the brain associated with positive emotions - the left prefrontal lobes - than his laboratory had ever measured. And that wasn't only while his subject was meditating.

In tests on another monk, Dr Paul Ekman of the University of California discovered they could let off an explosive sound, equivalent to a gun going off, beside the monk's ear while the monk was practising one-pointedness meditation, and his heart rate and blood pressure would actually decrease.

During another test, the same monk didn't even startle (that is, his facial muscles didn't move) when the sound went off. Classic research tells us the startle reflex is impossible to prevent.

Here's the rub: there's good clinical evidence starting to emerge of the extraordinary physiological effects of meditation; there's plenty of anecdotal evidence on the efficacy of various techniques; plus there's considerable support for its use in the medical community. All that's considered lacking now is the weight of research on its therapeutic effects to help direct and share its benefits.

"The important new frontier is looking at clinical outcomes," says Monash University's Hassed.

Not that this is a straightforward undertaking by any means.

Dr Ramesh Manocha, a clinical research fellow at the Sydney Royal Hospital for Women's Natural Therapies Unit, says: "One of the problems with meditation research is that the definitions are very imprecise, and that has led to very mixed and mediocre results under scientific conditions."

Manocha headed