Study: Mindful Meditation Provides Opioid-Free Pain Relief

A new study finds that mindful meditation does not utilize the endogenous opioid system to alleviate pain, and study authors say the findings could be significant for chronic pain suffers seeking non-opiate-based methods of pain relief.

A team of researchers sought to determine whether meditation relies on the body’s opioids to decrease pain, injecting study participants with either naloxone—a drug designed to block opioids’ pain-reducing effects—or a saline placebo.
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In total, 78 healthy, pain-free volunteers took part in the randomized, double-blinded study, for which the participants were divided into 4 groups for the 4-day trial. One group consisted of patients who practiced meditation as well as taking naloxone, while a control group did not take part in meditation but took naloxone. A third group meditated as well as being administered the saline placebo, and the fourth group did not meditate, but received the saline placebo. The investigators induced pain by using a thermal probe to heat a small area of participants’ skin to 49 degrees Centigrade, a temperature the authors note as causing great pain to most individuals.

Participants rated their pain on a sliding scale. Overall, the authors found that pain ratings among those in the meditation group that received naloxone were cut by 24% from the baseline measurement. The authors note this finding as especially noteworthy, as it indicates that meditation can substantially limit pain by using a different pathway when the body’s opioid receptors were chemically blocked. In addition, pain ratings were decreased by 21% in the meditation group that also received the placebo-saline injection.

The results “show that meditation doesn’t engage endogenous opioids to reduce pain, and that pain relief can be experienced after only 80 minutes of training,” says Fadel Zeidan, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest School of Medicine, and lead author of the study.

Thus, the use of meditation may, in theory, “reduce pain and avoid cross tolerance effects with opioid therapies,” concludes Zeidan.

—Mark McGraw

Reference

Zeidan F, Emerson N, et al. Mindfulness Meditation-Based Pain Relief Employs Different Neural Mechanisms Than Placebo and Sham Mindfulness Meditation-Induced Analgesia. J Neurosci. 2016.