Mindfulness Beats Pain

No one is suggesting that mindful meditation could be the answer to the country’s opioid crisis, but some experts think it could make a dent in it. Researchers at Wake Forest are convinced that mindful meditation can reduce pain, and more significantly, it can reduce pain through mechanisms unrelated to our bodies’ opioid system. A Wake Forest news release reports that in a randomized, double-blinded study, 78 healthy, pain-free volunteers were divided into four groups for the four-day (20 minutes per day) trial. The groups consisted of: meditation plus naloxone,which blocks the pain-reducing effects of opioids; non-meditation control plus naloxone; meditation plus saline placebo; or non-meditation control plus saline placebo. The researchers induced pain by heating a small area of the participants’ skin to 120.2 degrees Fahrenheit, and asked participants to rate their pain. Ready? The envelope please… The researchers found that participants’ pain ratings were reduced by 24 percent from the baseline measurement in the meditation group that received the naloxone, an important find because it showed that even when the body’s opioid receptors were chemically blocked, meditation still was able to significantly reduce pain by using a different pathway. Pain ratings also were reduced by 21 percent in the meditation group that received the placebo-saline injection. By comparison, the non-meditation control groups reported increases in pain regardless of whether they got the naloxone or placebo-saline injection.