Dr Ramesh Manocha investigates meditation as a stress management invervention

Dr Ramesh Manocha recently had a paper published titled “Using meditation for less stress and better wellbeing; A seminar for GPs”. The paper detailed a study in which 293 doctors were taught meditation in order to reduce stress and increase wellbeing. The abstract and full paper can be found here.

The literature on meditation

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…

5 groups of meditation techniques

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…

Meditation vs. psychotherapy to reduce anxiety

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…

Graph: meditation studies published per year in MEDLINE

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…

Sahaja Yoga meditation as a treatment for hot flushes

Sahaja Yoga meditation (SYM) may be helpful in mitigating the experience of hot flushes (HFs) in menopause via a number of possible pathways. First, like many other forms of meditation, SYM has been shown to reduce arousal in laboratory experiments. An interesting study on stress-induced HFs however, suggests that simple…

Neki’s description of the sahaja state

Neki (1975) describes the sahaja state as a mental health ideal in more detail, asserting that it combines the elements of illumination (the direct experience of reality, devoid of the filtering effect of the mind), equipoise (the absence of emotional turbulence) and its replacement with a sense of underlying joy…

Dr Ramesh Manocha: Meditation as understood in the East

Despite the scientific establishment’s equivocal conclusions about the efficacy of meditation, positive perceptions are evident among the Western lay population because of the increasing popularity of the philosophy, metaphysics and folklore associated with the ancient and traditional Indian ideas of meditation. So it is important to develop an understanding of…

Meditation to treat ADHD

Despite an absence of reliable evidence, complementary and alternative treatments are rapidly increasing in popularity in the treatment of Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They include dietary modification, the use of nutritional supplementation (such as essential fatty acids, zinc, magnesium, amino acids, megavitamins) and herbs (such as ginseng and ginkgo). Also…

Evidence that meditation is not relaxation

There is widespread agreement in the literature that meditation reduces sympathetic activation and increases parasympathetic activation of the ANS, that is, it reduces physiological arousal thereby triggering a characteristic spectrum of simultaneous physiological changes: reduced respiratory rate (RR), reduced heart rate (HR), reduced blood pressure (BP), reduced electrodermal activity (EDA)…