n a recent article posted in the Wall Street Journal on April 15, 2013.
At the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center situated in Boston, there have been many doctors that have started prescribing quite an effective prescription best known as meditation.
A doctor by the name of Aditi Nerukar, a primary care doctor and also an assistant medical care director says that individuals should engage in around five minutes of meditation twice a day and gradually continue increasing the time. It is her way of prescribing a medication in which people do not have to take high doses of medication.
She says that patients should continue meditation until they are able to get around twenty minutes twice a day. This will help to treat many issues such as insomnia and also irritable bowel syndrome.
These days there are numerous integrative medicine programs that are increasingly showing up in hospitals and also clinics around the world. There has been recent research has been done to find out that meditation is capable of reducing blood pressure and is quite effective in helping those patients that have chronic illnesses, pain, and also depression. There was a study that was published last year in which meditation was used in order to reduce the chances of a heart attack or even a stroke among people that had heart disease.
Mark O’Boyle
Martha O’Boyle who is from Fremont California says that meditation is very effective when it comes to dealing with chronic pain.
At Bert Israel, Deaconess Medical Center treatments such as meditation and also many other mind-body therapies are being implemented in the care facilities. This program started offering many of its services these past six months. There are numerous health experts that have great hopes that there will be group meditation classes to treat patients very soon.
There are many health experts that say that meditation is not going to replace traditional medical therapies, it is just going to implement them. For instance, when someone breathes slowly it temporarily helps to lower a person’s blood pressure. Techniques that are quite similar to this will be used to substitute medications.
Ms. Josephine Briggs, who is the director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, said that meditation is useful for symptom management, but it is definitely not suitable for curing or even treating diseases.
Dr. Briggs has revealed that the agency is looking to fund numerous studies to search for meditation and also breathing techniques to figure out their effects on various conditions. If meditation proves to be beneficial, then it can be utilized in order to help women avoid using hormone treatments that tend to have dangerous side effects.
Martha O’Boyle, who is a fifty-one-year-old woman residing in Fremont, California has suffered from chronic pain in her chest, arms, and also other areas of her body after a heart attack that occurred two years ago. When the cardiologist told her to start meditating she started taking classes at the Stanford Hospital & Clinics in the year 2011. There she took an eight-week class that had sessions once a week for around two-three hours. Once she started the classes she instantly noticed the many benefits of it. Now she meditates for around twenty to forty-five minutes and feels as if the pain has totally vanished.
The most popular meditation that is recommended by professional doctors and also hospital programs is known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction that has been developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
This meditation involves sitting in a quiet posture that is comfortable and closing your eyes so that you can watch your breath and just relax. Dr. Nerurkar said that she will not send the patients to class in order to get training, but instead, she and the other physicians will demonstrate the techniques right in their offices.
Murali Doraiswamy who is a professor of psychiatry at the Duke University Medical Center situated in NC says that it still has not been clearly understood how meditation is able to have an effect on the body. There have been some particular forms of meditation that have been effective when it comes to activating the nervous system and also helping the body to relax.
Meditation assists is improving the blood supply, slows down the heart rate and breathing, and even increases your ability to digest foods. It will even slow down the stress hormones such as cortisol. Dr. Doraiswamy recommends this medication for those individuals that have depression, anxiety disorder, stress, or even need general maintenance of brain alertness and improvement of cardiovascular health.
There have been thousands of studies have been published, but only around 500 of them have been clinical trials that are able to treat various ailments. Around only forty of them have been seen as long-term studies. It has not been known if there is an optimal amount of time for meditating that is the most effective.
Also, it has not been shown that this process can cause individuals to live longer or even be prevented them from developing chronic illnesses or diseases.
There are even some short-term studies that have revealed that meditation is able to improve cognitive abilities such as attention and also their memory. By using imaging scientists have revealed that meditation is able to improve the functional performance of the circuits in the brain and also reduce the shrinkage of centers in the brain, especially for those people that are quite vulnerable to disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
In quite a recent study that was published last year in the American Heart Association Journal Circulation: The Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes for African Americans that have heart disease and practice Transcendental Meditation regularly are forty-eight percent less likely to have a heart attack or even stroke than those people that are from the lower class. This study took place for around five years and involved around 200 individuals.
In recent research, it has been found that meditation is able to result in molecular changes that can affect the length of telomeres, which is the covering at the end of the chromosomes that tends to get shorter as individuals age.
This is a study that involves around forty family caregivers of patients with dementia. Half of the individuals meditated on a regular basis while the other half relaxed while listening to music for around twelve minutes each day.
After the eight-week study, it was discovered that those people who meditated had around 43% improvement in their telomerase activity as compared to those who had a 3.7% gain due to listening to music. People who meditated showed better mental capability, cognitive functioning, and also lower levels of depression as compared to those that were in the control group. This study was first published in the month of January in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
The government-funded research is also exploring the effects of meditation on dieting and also depression.
Remember, an Ounce of Prevention in Each Moment is Worth a Pound of Cure Down the Road.