A new study conducted by Dr. Fadel Zeidan at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and published on Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, has found that meditation is very effective for pain relief even in people who have just learned how to practice it, better than some of the most powerful drugs.
The study used 15 volunteers who had never meditated before. They attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. In these training sessions the participants were taught simply to concentrate on their breathing and to let go of distracting thoughts and emotions. Then a heated probe was pressed against their leg, steadily raising the skin temperature to a painful 32C, while scans measured activity in the brain. It was found that the perception of pain and its unpleasantness was greatly reduced.
According to lead author Dr Zeidan, the effect was a 40% diminution in intensity of pain and 57% reduction in pain unpleasantness. This compares with the effects of powerful drugs such as morphine, as Dr Zeiden went on to say: Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 per cent. 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.
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