An international conference was hosted at the Centre of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, an institution on the campus of the Allahabad University campus in Uttar Pradesh, India. Concluding on Tuesday, the conference was inundated with international and interdisciplinary researchers whose names hold clout when it comes to cognitive science, and they were focused on illuminating topics related to meditation and yoga to determine how it affects or even controls the functions of the brain. Interestingly, a new study looks at so-called compassion meditation therapy as an alternative treatment for reducing fibromyalgia-related pain. Additionally, a second study published near the end of February found Sahaja Yoga meditation to correlate with neural network development.
Clearly, there is a movement primarily (but not exclusively) outside of Western medicine that is privileging research of the effects and significance of meditation. At the conference, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru, Dr. B.N. Gangadhar made pointed remarks about clinical applications for meditation. Another professor from the University of Virginia discussed a professional development program called CARE — Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education — which marries mindful awareness to compassion practices as a teacher's aid.
India was the site of the conference, but there's no shortage of meditation studies in other countries. The Fibromyalgia study, for example, was conducted by researchers in the heart of the UK at the University of Derby in tandem with others from the Awake to Wisdom Centre for Meditation and Mindfulness Research based in Italy. There were also other experts on the project working from the Primary Care Prevention and Health Promotion Research Network, and others still were experts from the University of Zaragoza and Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu in Spain. It gained some attention since fibromyalgia is commonly known as the reason Lady Gaga canceled her world tour recently.
Fibromyalgia is debilitating and very painful, and the chronic pain associated with it affects about three percent of European adults, a statistic mirrored almost exactly in the UK specifically. Most of these adults are women, and the research team conducted this study with 42 female participants divvied up into two groups. One group was a relaxation control group while the other was a compassion therapy group, and the latter showed considerable improvements throughout several psychological outcomes and mitigated their symptoms by approximately 36 percent in total according to the study.
Psychology lecturer Dr. William Van Gordon of the University of Derby's Online Learning, says that "The effectiveness of pharmacological treatments for fibromyalgia, such as anti-depressants, has long been questioned and can lead to unwanted side effects. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of compassion meditation as an alternative treatment for fibromyalgia. Following the study, most participants in the [attachment-based compassion therapy] group showed significant improvements and some no longer met the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia."
The study incorporated group sessions and daily homework as part of the compassion therapy that participants underwent. These included exercises used to help subjects concentrate on cultivating comprehension of the universality of suffering and thereby establishing an emotional connection with the suffering of others as well as a yearning to alleviate the pains of others. The symptoms that people experienced were measured in severity using the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire, which is a survey put together to take stock of the health statuses of women with fibromyalgia syndrome based on the known symptoms and criteria constitute a diagnosis thereof.
"As fibromyalgia is linked with sickness-related absence from work, incapacity to work, reduced work productivity and high usage of health-care resources, these results are not only meaningful for the sufferers but could help to address the problem of absence from work and the cost implications of this," Gordon explains. The reduction of symptoms in this study was measured to be about 36 percent for fibromyalgia, and that's significant in light of the fact that a reduction of a minimum of 14 percent is considered clinically meaningful in this sort of study. There was a reduction of about 30 percent when it came to psychological flexibility for that matter and 54 percent with regard to depression.
Meanwhile, experts from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig teamed up with researchers from the University of La Laguna and others from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King's College London to publish the Sahaja Yoga meditation study in Neuroscience. It's a specific kind of meditation associated with neural network development for brain regions considered vital to emotion regulation and control of one's own ability to focus. They recorded brain functional connectivity and anatomy in patients who entered states of mental silence, and they used magnetic resonance scanners to do so.
Ultimately, meditators proved to engage an average of 7.5 percent more grey matter than the control group. These studies and the aforementioned conference all point to Western medicine's discounting of meditation therapy as, perhaps, an oversight. It's still considered alternative medicine at best and certainly not scientific, yet it proves to be an exemplary therapy in many studies that collectively are difficult to dismiss as mere statistical anomalies.
[researchpaper 리서치페이퍼= Cedric Dent 기자]