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Meditation as medication.
A federally funded study on hypertension conducted in West Oakland yielded positive results for the practitioners of transcendental meditation, a technique used to relax the body and the mind — and much, much more, say hardcore adherents.
Findings of the study were published Friday in the American Journal of Hypertension, a publication of the American Society of Hypertension Inc. The study was the work of a medical team led by Dr. Frank Staggers, a longtime Oakland physician who now works as a senior detox physician at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco. Research for the project was conducted over a period of 10 years, starting in 1994.
The study comprised 150 people, whose average age was 49, who were divided into three separate groups and used separate techniques to try to reduce stress levels and lower blood pressure. One group practiced meditation, another used progressive muscle relaxation, and the third used conventional health and education techniques to lower blood pressure.
“I was working at the West Oakland Health Center in the 1980s when I made my first observations during the course of my patient examinations,” Staggers said. “I told my patients with hypertension to close their eyes, relax and take deep breaths.”
When Staggers began to notice a difference in the stress levels of his patients, he started digging a little deeper into relaxation techniques.
He contacted Dr. Robert Schneider, a colleague from Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, and the two put together a research team and sent a funding proposal to the National Institutes of Health. The NIH responded with a grant from its national Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Blood pressure, which is disproportionately high among African Americans, was monitored for a year in all three testing categories, Staggers said.
Transcendental meditation was chosen over other practices, such as Zen and religious meditation, because there were varying techniques and not nearly as much research data as had been collected on TM over the years.
It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal.
“These techniques had a long track record and had been studied at some of the largest research universities in the nation, but they had never been studied with respect to treating disease,” Staggers said.
“As a practicing physician, I didn’t want to take a technique that no one has ever used, because you don’t know what will happen. TM has been studied since the 1960s.”
Of the three groups that participated in the study, meditation practitioners witnessed the reduction of 6 millimeters in diastolic pressure and a 3-millimeter drop in systolic blood-pressure readings.
There was also a 23 percent reduction in that group in the use of antihypertensive medications used to treat the disease.
Staggers said meditation has shown promise in helping reduce the symptoms of numerous physical and mental ailments, including asthma, depression, anxiety, cancer, diabetes and arthritis. He also said the technique can be an effective tool in the fight against drug dependency and addiction.
Joyce Muse-Harris, a nurse practitioner and Oakland resident who suffers from hypertension, took part it the study and heaps praise on how meditating for 20 minutes twice a day affects her health and outlook.
“I wanted to be in the meditation program because I’ve always believed in alternative medical techniques and haven’t always agreed with the techniques used in Western medicine,” she said.
The meditation sessions helped her reduce stress and “get a handle on some of the things that were happening in my life,” she said.
Muse-Harris used the techniques to deal with a colleague with whom she had a conflict. “After doing the meditation for a while, that person didn’t bother me anymore, because I decided I would not add to their stress,” she said.
Muse-Harris has gotten better at the technique and says she can now meditate just about anywhere — riding in a car or even on a BART train.
“At first it was difficult to do, but if you sit quietly, and let your mind relax, it will start running through all the errands you have to do, a shopping list, but if you don’t fight, those things fade away and your mind becomes clear,” she said.
Muse-Harris still takes hypertension medication but says the meditation provides her with an inner calm that keeps a lid on stressful reaction to challenging situations.
I must admit to a little skepticism about some the claims made by TMers over the years, particularly their description of mental-flying when a person achieves the highest state of the art.
The “yogic fliers” who sit in the lotus position and begin to hop around on foam cushions once they’ve reached a higher mental state always looked pretty suspicious to me, but this is a bit different.
If calming the mind in order to heal the body can be achieved through meditation instead of medication, I say go for it.
adapted from Sfgate.com by Chip Johnson
It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal.
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