Meditation is effective against pain. It is even more effective than a placebo cream. 75 participants agreed to burn themselves to deliver these conclusions.
The protocol is unorthodox, but it has proven to be effective. For the first time, a study concludes that mindfulness meditation is more effective than a placebo in managing pain. The works, to appear in the November 18 edition of Journal of Neuroscience, compare this approach to a placebo cream and a semblance of meditation.
75 courageous people took part in an experiment. Researchers from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States) asked them to accept … being burned by a thermal probe heated to 50 ° C. “A level of heat that most people find very painful,” says the press release from the medical center. Far from being frightened, the participants were divided into four groups: mindfulness meditation, placebo meditation, placebo pain reliever cream and a control group. The intervention lasted 4 days, at a rate of 20 minutes per session.
Three parameters were used to measure the reaction to pain. The volunteers noted the intensity of the suffering and their emotional reaction to it. Functional MRIs also made it possible to observe which regions of the brain were activated by the burn and the method adopted.
Pain 27% less intense
Mindfulness meditation is proving to be far more effective than any other approach, the authors conclude – not without astonishment. “We were very surprised by the results,” admits Fadel Zeidan, lead author of the publication. And for good reason: the placebo cream reduces the intensity of pain by 11%. Meditation, on the other hand, reduces suffering by 27%. The emotional aspect is reduced by 44%.
“MRIs show for the first time that mindfulness meditation produces very different brain reactions from those produced by placebo cream,” adds Fadel Zeidan. While we thought there would be some overlap between the brain regions of people who meditated and those on placebo, the results provide recent, objective evidence that shows meditation in unique ways reduces pain. Indeed, meditation activates regions associated with self-control, as well as the thalamus, which determines which sensory information goes to which brain center. Conversely, the cream reduces activity in the areas that manage the perception of pain.
The placebo meditation also allows a small effect (- 9% on the intensity of the pain and – 24% on the emotional impact). The mechanism is certainly linked to slower breathing, according to the researchers.
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