Mental silence and its associated yogic philosophy may provide a basis for taxonomy of meditation that is practically useful in the delivery of healthcare. An intervention with a specific effect such as Sahaja Yoga meditation has a wide range of applications in medicine, psychology and neuroscience. It is particularly relevant…
Like any other evaluation of therapeutics, the detectable effect of the intervention will be determined by the degree to which the participant complies with the treatment. This is particularly important in meditation research because meditation requires considerable active involvement and commitment. There are several ways to assess compliance, including attendance…
An extensive search of the scientific literature identified 3,500 peer-reviewed publications that featured “meditation” as a key word. Yet, of these, only 135 (approximately 4%) fulfilled the very basic requirements of experimental evaluation, i.e. they were prospective trials using control groups and random allocation. Importantly, even within this subset of…
For my systematic analysis of meditation studies, because of the relatively small number of studies available for analysis, the many different meditation techniques were grouped into 5 thematically related categories. These were: Relaxation Response and studies describing the intervention as based on it. The MBSR and studies describing the intervention…
With regard to the physiology of meditation, research designs can be divided into 3 categories: 1) Case studies of meditation featuring small numbers of participants in which there is no attempt to control for confounding variables. While these are useful for generating hypotheses, they do not provide scientifically valid insights…
The effects of meditation on anxiety and stress are comparable to effect sizes described in conventional meta-analyses of psychotherapy field studies. For example Mattick’s (1990) review of psychotherapy for neurotic patients reported a mean effect size of 0.74 for verbal psychotherapy and 0.97 for behavioural psychotherapy vis-a-vis a mean effect…
This graph shows the number of meditation studies considered as serious explorations of meditation’s effects published per year in the MEDLINE database. The maximum yearly output was in 2000–2001 when 12 RCTs were reported in MEDLINE. In the same time period 106 RCTs for fluoxetine, as an example of a…
The Jadad scoring system is a widely used method of rating randomised controlled trials for basic methodological rigour. The Jadad system is inadequately structured to meaningfully discern the methodological standards of meditation trials. This is because the unique issues associated with controlling for non-specific effects and sources of bias are…
It seems obvious that the non-specific effect of any intervention is closely related to its credibility and plausibility as a therapeutic intervention i.e. its “face validity”. Now, some of the effects associated with meditation must be non-specific, i.e. comprising a mixture of placebo, therapeutic contact, spontaneous improvement, and so on,…
Methodological validity is therefore the major challenge to meditation research, and the chief problems within this broad category are first, the use of appropriate control strategies, second, the need for randomisation and other strategies to exclude bias and third, a definition of meditation that allows inter-trial comparability and remains consistent…
