“I try to slow my breathing and think of the pain burning up and leaving my body.” This is what Jennifer Akers, a caseworker, writer and mother, does when fibromyalgia, a chronic illness characterised by widespread pain and fatigue usually in the muscles, tendons and ligaments, overwhelms her. Sometimes her physician’s painkillers are ineffective so she uses a less conventional weapon in her war against pain.
Medication and traditional medicine are often futile against the pain. Meditation and visualization mindfulness techniques are offering hope for the estimated 100 million Americans, mostly women, who suffer from fibromyalgia pain, fatigue and sleep disturbance.
A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin recruited 69 women with the chronic condition. They took a two-month course learning stress reduction and meditation techniques. All the women in the study reported significant reduction in pain symptoms, disability, and sleep disturbance.
This isn’t the only study to obtain these results. Seventy women took part in a study using stress reduction meditation by The Arthritis-Fibromyalgia Center, of Newton Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts. Fifty-one percent showed moderate to marked improvements. In a similar study at the Center for Integrative Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, patients who took an eight-week course of thirty -minute meditation daily experienced a 44% reduction in anxiety.
Jennifer uses mindfulness to control her pain, and stress, on those days she has problems getting to the typewriter. “I try to do slow breathing to give myself some peace and mini down-time. It works to slow … stimulation of things in my environment.”
The fact that sitting on mats and concentrating the mind on pleasant thoughts or emptying the mind of any negative ones, helps reduce pain and symptoms may have far-reaching implications for the treatment for other illness as well. A study by the Department of Psychosocial Resources at the University of Calgary involved 90 cancer patients with an average age of 51 at various stages of the disease. The patients participated in weekly meditation sessions lasting one and a-half-hour every week for seven weeks. This resulted in a dramatic 65% reduction in overall mood disturbances such as depression, anxiety, anger, and confusion. The patients also experienced 31% less stress. The results were the same regardless of gender, age, or stage and severity of the disease.
While mindfulness isn’t a cure, it does make life more bearable for those suffering from chronic pain and stress. But if the optimism of some researchers is any indication. the possibilities may be even more astounding.
In the words of Larry Dossey M.D. a spiritual healer, “Meditation is a powerful way of entering into healing states. Herbert Vincent, for 20 years at Harvard, has shown that meditative states, and almost any kind of contemplative state, can be good for the body. When people meditate, the blood pressure comes down, the heart rate falls, immune changes take place in the body, and so on. So meditation is certainly a way of bringing about healing influences in our own body.”
References
Abstracts from American Psychosomatic Soc. March ’06 conference
Benefits Of Meditation And Stress Reduction In
Fibromyalgia
Christopher Coe, Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
PubMed: A Service of the National Library of Medicine
The Impact Of A Meditation-Based Stress Reduction Program On Fibromyalgia
Arthritis-Fibromyalgia Center, Newton Wellesley Hospital, Massachusetts.
Psychosomatic Medicine
A Randomized, Wait-List Controlled Clinical Trial: The Effect of a Mindfulness Meditation-Based Stress Reduction Program on Mood and Symptoms of Stress in Cancer Outpatients
Michael Speca, PsyD, Linda E. Carlson, PhD, Eileen Goodey, MSW and Maureen Angen, PhD
From the Department of Psychosocial Resources (M.S., L.E.C., E.G., M.A.), Tom Baker Cancer Centre, Alberta Cancer Board; and Departments of Oncology (M.S.) and Educational Psychology (M.A.), University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
General Hospital of Psychiatry – Chicago
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction And Health-Related Quality Of Life In
A Heterogeneous Patient Population
Diane K. Reibel, Ph.D., Jeffrey M. Greeson, M.S., George C. Brainard, Ph.D.,
Steven Rosenzweig, M.D.
Center for Integrative Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, USA(ok)
