Meditation as a Powerful Means of Pain Management

You suffer from chronic joint pain – Vicodin and Demerol have no effect on you anymore. You head to the doctor for some relief and she has some good news. There’s an even better, more powerful drug on the market and you’re eligible! She gives you the script: one hour of meditation for the next several weeks. Sound hooey?

A recent studyHuman Brain Waves from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has revealed that meditation can be more effective for pain control than morphine. Although meditation has been a major method for achieving better focus and self-awareness for more than five thousand years, it is now receiving recent attention due to the study’s conclusion that meditation can be more effective than drugs at helping people manage pain.

Dr. Fadel Zeidan, the lead researcher and author of the study, is a post-doctoral fellow at Wake Forest. He explains, “This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation.” The results were surprisingly positive: with just a short training on ways in which to effectively meditate, patients were able to reduce pain intensity by more than 40 percent and lower pain unpleasantness by almost 60 percent. Meditation was almost twice as effective as morphine, which reduces pain by only about 25 percent.

The study involved 15 volunteers who had not previously studied meditation techniques. The volunteers participated in four 20-minute mindfulness meditation-training sessions. Mindfulness is a Buddhist practice that allows for deeper focus and better self-awareness. The technique involved teaching the participants to focus intently on breathing. Before and after completing the training, participants’ brain activity was measured using an arterial-spin-labeling MRI and was subjected to pain from a heated device.

The arterial-spin-labeling MRI revealed that once the participants were able to use meditation to manage their pain, the reduction in pain levels was as high as 93 percent. Further, the region of the brain that responds to pain was slowed significantly after the meditation teachings, while areas of the brain that manage pain were all increased.

Dr. Robert Coghill, a senior author involved in the study and a professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest explained that the more areas of the brain that were activated by the meditation, the larger the reduction in pain. Coghill says, “One of the reasons that meditation may have been so effective in blocking pain was that it did not work at just one place in the brain, but instead reduced pain at multiple levels of processing.” Wake Forest study results were so impressive that the facility has implemented meditation as a standard pain-management protocol.

Those active in the practice of meditation for pain management were pleased to have scientific research validate their knowledge, although they were not surprised. Subhana Barzaghi, a meditation teacher at Bluegum Sangha, was a trained midwife who taught breathing and meditation techniques to reduce the pain experienced during childbirth and relieve the pain caused by contractions. She explains, “Meditation teaches us to observe rather than get caught up in the strong sensations we are experiencing. We learn to stop labeling and therefore stop reacting. In this way, instead of tightening up against it and resisting, which causes further tension, we start to soften into it. As we do this, the pain can begin to soften and subside.”

1 thought on “Meditation as a Powerful Means of Pain Management”

  1. The fact that meditation is twice as effective as morphine is really fascinating. My mom is a doctor and she sees people who had some type of surgery in the past and were put on pain meds and became addicted. The fact that people could bypass any potential for becoming addicted to pain meds by using meditation instead is so encouraging. Plus, these people experienced this magnitude of success with meditation, and they didn’t need extensive training or instruction!

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.