Mediate to relieve pain

UF Health Podcasts

There might be a way to relieve pain without money and medication, and it might just blow your mind.
A new study suggests mindfulness meditation is more effective at relieving pain than placebo treatments.
Researchers from the University of California – San Diego and Dartmouth College studied 115 healthy volunteers and assigned them to four groups. One group practiced mindfulness meditation, one group practiced a placebo-type meditation, one group used a placebo cream, and the last group acted as the control.
In the placebo meditation, participants meditated, but without mindfulness instruction.
Participants received four 20-minute training sessions for the technique they were assigned to, then underwent pain testing. During this testing, researchers applied heat to their legs while scanning their brains using an MRI.
The mindfulness meditation group were told to focus on their breath and observe and acknowledge the feeling of pain without judgment. The placebo- meditation group performed similar exercises but did not receive mindfulness instruction. The placebo group used a cream on their leg that they were told would relieve pain, and the control group rested.
Results showed that participants in the mindfulness meditation group rated their pain lower than those in the placebo meditation and placebo groups.
And, after using advanced analysis on the brain, the researchers found mindfulness meditation was the only pain-relieving technique that decreased brain activity in the regions linked to pain sensation and pain’s emotional impact.
In short: Need to alleviate some pain? All you may need is your brain.