Study: Mindfulness Meditation Provides Pain Relief

In comparison to a placebo, practicing mindfulness meditation can provide greater relief to patients dealing with pain, according to a new study.

In a study of 75 healthy, pain-free participants, patients were assigned to a mindfulness meditation, placebo meditation or relaxation, placebo analgesic cream or petroleum jelly, or control group. The authors induced pain by using a thermal probe to heat a small area of the skin to 120.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Patients related pain intensity or physical sensation and pain unpleasantness, or their emotional response. The investigators scanned participants’ brains with arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) before and after their 3-day group interventions.
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The team found pain intensity dropping by 27% in the mindfulness meditation group, which also experienced a 44% decrease in terms of emotional pain. The placebo cream, meanwhile, cut the sensation of physical pain by 11%, and emotional response by 13%, the authors noted, adding that brain scans demonstrated that mindfulness meditation generated drastically different brain activity patterns in comparison to those produced by a placebo. The placebo meditation group saw a 9% decrease in pain rating, and a 24% drop in pain unpleasantness, which the researchers say could be attributable to a relaxation effect linked to slower breathing.

Fadel Zeidan, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow at Wake Forest School of Medicine, and lead author of the study, stresses that the findings are preliminary, and “should be used with caution, because they are focused on healthy, pain free populations, not chronic pain patients.

That said, “we have repeatedly shown that brief mindfulness meditation training reduces pain and does so by engaging a unique network of brain activation,” adds Zeidan, noting that this study demonstrates that mindfulness meditation is more effective than, and engages distinct neural mechanisms from, placebo analgesia.

Therefore, “practitioners may feel more inclined to recommend this technique to their patients, because we have seen that the analgesic effects of mindfulness meditation can be experienced after very brief mental training regimens above and beyond the effects of placebo,” concludes Zeidan, adding that “how long the effects last and what pain population mindfulness meditation would be most effective for remains to be seen.”

—Mark McGraw

Reference

Zeidan F, Grant J., et al. Mindful meditation-related pain relief: evidence for unique brain mechanisms in the regulation of pain. Journal of Neuroscience. 2015.