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Practitioners of meditation say there are health benefits, but there's no proof -- yet
Posted by: Rob on August 10, 2007 at 11:23AM CST

By David Steinkraus
Journal Times
Thursday, August 9, 2007 12:27 PM CDT
“I was making a lot of money when I was up the corporate ladder, but I was killing myself that way,” said 57-year-old Linda Messerschmidt while sitting over a cup of tea in the back of her West Racine yoga business, Your Yoga Lifestyle.

Yoga, which she’s been practicing for five years and teaching for three, was her antidote to the corporate travel business that was accompanied by high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, and medications to blunt the effects of her lifestyle. She’s off one medication now. The dose of the other is half what it was, and with a blood pressure consistently around 106 or 120 she said she’s wondering if she even needs that.

People take up meditative practices, such as yoga or Transcendental Meditation,  for many reasons, and they say they find benefits, but what’s lacking, at least in terms of physical health, is proof.

Medical studies

The federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality issued a report in June about meditation’s effects. It came from one of the evidence-based practice centers maintained by the agency to review medical studies and determine whether they have reached any definitive conclusion. In the case of meditation, they didn’t.

There are five main meditation techniques used in medical studies, and most of them concentrated on whether meditation could effect high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, or substance abuse, the researchers wrote. But many of the studies were of poor quality. Transcendental meditation, qi gong (a Chinese technique), and Zen Buddhist mediation significantly reduced blood pressure in a small number of people, and yoga reduced stress but overall, they wrote, the evidence was so weak that no real conclusion is possible. Like many scientific studies, what came out was not yes or no. It was we don’t know.

It was a good review, said Dr. Clarence Grim, clinical professor of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and also someone exploring meditation as part of his longtime interest in high blood pressure.

A team he is leading is nearing the end of a five-year study of meditation and its effects on blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. It’s the sort of trial that probably won’t be repeated because of the expense, he said, but when it’s over it should provide a solid answer.

His group used standard transcendental meditation taught by certified instructors. There was also another group of people who didn’t receive any meditation instruction but were given general health information. Their results will be compared with those of the meditators.

Blood pressure went down in both groups, Grim said, but he doesn’t know whether the drop was significant. The data analysis is being done outside his oversight, a common technique used in medical research to prevent bias from twisting the results of a study.

Some people become very involved in meditation while others try it and drop it, he said. The deep involvement seemed almost like an addiction.

“Some people seem to get enormous psychological benefit from there. Whether there is a physiological benefit is what we’re testing.”

The psychological

As part of the work, he also was trained in transcendental meditation, but he didn’t find it that absorbing. If he’s tired or tense he said he’ll do it to relax. “Your breathing changes quite remarkably actually. I was impressed with it.”

David Victorson is a psychologist and research assistant professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He uses a technique called mindfulness-based meditation and has been teaching it to cancer patients at Evanston Northwestern Health Care, a hospital affiliated with the medical school.

He applauded the AHRQ meditation study for its synthesis of a large amount of material, yet he said the sheer size and breadth of the study may conceal benefits in certain areas. Also, the field may be too young yet for that kind of large analysis, he said, because there hasn’t been enough time for people to design rigorous studies that measure the same thing and can be judged scientifically.

For his part, Victorson found psychological benefits in the meditation he teaches. “For me it really helps calm my monkey mind.” That’s a common term, as if the mind, swinging from thought to thought to thought, was a monkey swinging busily from branch to branch to branch, never being still.

When he’s reading his son a story he can now be completely focused on that, rather than on wondering when the story will end so he can go to his computer and check his e-mail.

“Of course I have my mindless zone-out moments, but I really try to stay actively engaged in the present moment in my conversations with people, while I walk, while I eat, while I partake in life. And so for me that’s one of the biggest benefits is I get to live life on purpose versus just going through the motions in a multitasking kind of way.”

Searching for

something

“A lot more men are coming to me,” Messerschmidt said. “I think they’re under a lot of stress. And the men that come to yoga and meditate, it’s amazing the difference, and they’re so committed, they never miss.”

She’s had students who used meditation techniques to still their claustrophobia while receiving MRI scans. Another student is a competitive fisherman and uses yoga and meditation to deal with the stress of standing in a boat all day and casting.

She’s used it herself. About 18 months ago she was diagnosed with melanoma of the eye. Her right eye is now a prosthetic, and the whole process came with much pain. When her doctor took her off Vicodin, she used Tylenol and meditation to deal with that pain. Now she uses meditation to deal with the stress of being rescanned every six months to determine whether the cancer is gone or has spread to some other part of her body.

“People won’t take the time for themselves nowadays,” she said. And they need to because so many are living their lives at high speed. When she woke, her first action used to be turning on the television to see the news. Now it’s tea and meditation.

Now is also the time to start if people think they want to or ought to meditate, she said. So many people say they want to do yoga, or start meditation — once they complete the other 10 things on their recreation list. “I just want people to take time for themselves and do what’s right for them, and work toward a better quality of life, and don’t wait till tomorrow.” It may not come.
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