The recent meditation study cited here was seriously flawed. If the same standards were used for all scientific research, there would be NO research studies showing that cigarette smoking is harmful, or that diet and exercise have any benefits for your health. For example, how can you do a do a double-blind study on Transcendental Meditation without the people meditation KNOWING that they are practicing TM? How could you study smoking without the smokers knowing they are smoking a pack a day? Here is a link to an article just published addressing the flaws of this study: http://www.physorg.com/news104501710.html

Top researchers criticize new meditation and health study

A controversial new government-funded report, which found that meditation does not improve health, is methodologically flawed, incomplete, and should be retracted.

“Meditation Practices for Health: State of the Research” was a health technology assessment report conducted at the University of Alberta and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the NIH-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The report was released earlier this month.

Professor Harald Walach of the University of Northampton and School of Social Sciences and the Samueli Institute for Information Biology in England reviewed the paper before its release and strongly urged the authors to withhold publication. “When I looked carefully into the details of the study, the whole analytical strategy looked rather haphazard and ad hoc” Walach said.

Robert Schneider, M.D., F.A.C.C., is one of the leading researchers on the health effects of meditation in the nation. Dr. Schneider has been the recipient of more than $22 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health over the past 20 years for his research on the effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique and natural medicine on cardiovascular disease. He says that relevant findings were excluded from the report, including peer-reviewed studies on the effects of this meditation technique on hypertension, cardiovascular disease, myocardial ischemia, atherosclerosis, changes to physiology, and improvements to mental and physical health.

Dr. Schneider cited two studies published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 2005, which demonstrated that individuals with high blood pressure who were randomly assigned to TM groups had a 30% lower risk for mortality than controls. These studies should have been included in the AHRQ report, Dr. Schneider said, but were inexplicably excluded. In addition, 75 published studies were overlooked, even though these were sent to the authors by one of the reviewers.

Dr. Schneider said the AHRQ report incorrectly analyzed studies and incorrectly rated the quality of the studies while applying statistical methods poorly, arbitrarily, and unsystematically. The report also included errors in collecting data from research studies, in recording data from papers, and in classifying studies. Several peer-reviewers pointed out major errors and inadequacies in the report prior to publication. However, these critiques by outside reviewers were largely ignored. (For critiques of the report, see http://www.mum.edu/inmp/welcome.html)

Dr. Schneider also cited a study published in the American Medical Association’s journal Archives of Internal Medicine in 2006 — one year after the AHRQ review ended in 2005 — which confirmed that the Transcendental Meditation technique lowers high blood pressure in heart disease patients. The study was conducted at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and was funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Schneider cited two studies published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 2005, which demonstrated that individuals with high blood pressure who were randomly assigned to TM groups had a 30% lower risk for mortality than controls. These studies should have been included in the AHRQ report, Dr. Schneider said, but were inexplicably excluded.

Inexplicably? This was a study about the effects of meditation on anxiety and depression, so it seems perfectly appropriate to exclude a study about blood pressure. Honestly! Don’t they teach kids the fundamentals of meta-analysis these days

Dear Craig and Everyone, Thank you for this opportunity to post a response to the above remarks on meditation research. Actually, the ill-thought study referred to above was NOT just on anxiety and depression, it alleged to consider the general health-effects of meditation and drew sweeping, unfounded conclusions. Scientists around the world are calling for a retraction of the misleading study, which used protocols that were inapplicable and excluded pertinent data. As an emergent science of consciousness, certain theoretical and practical aspects of the Transcendental Meditation program can appear, at least initially, to challenge the established scientific world view. The old test-tube egghead folk science does not predict or explain that a person could sit down, close their eyes and in effect do nothing, resulting in a broad range of immediate and measurable physiological outcomes and health benefits, such as growth of EEG brainwave coherence, reduced anxiety and depression, development of IQ and learning ability in children AND adults, reduced substance abuse, reduced hypertension, 70% drop in the need for medical care, and younger biological age — all of which have been borne out in the hundreds of scientific studies on TM, published in peer-reviewed scientific and academic journals (and conducted at Harvard, Yale, UCLA Medical School, Stanford, etc.). When resistance to the TM research arises within ostensibly objective-minded people, I have noticed that the opposition has little to do with the actual scientific data, but is rather about the old superstitions of materialism clashing with an emerging body of data that the opponents perceive as inconsistent with their beliefs. Thomas Kuhn says that in the course of scientific revolutions, there are stages of reaction to a new paradigm: First the anomalous data is ignored, then it is laughed at and ridiculed, then it is criticized, then it is violently attacked and becomes intensely controversial. (”It is very hard for a man to desert a tradition.”…the ignorance of the old paradigm being their tradition.) Only when the old codgers die off, says Kuhn, can the revolution in knowledge create a new world view. (Kuhn is usually credited for coining the phrase “paradigm shift.”) Indications are that the science of TM seem to be entering the final, argumentative stage of acceptance. In the spirit of science, anyone can know the truth about Transcendental Meditation by examining the data with an open mind. The vast and accumulating body of research validating the effects of TM may be seem anomalous in the context of the antiquated paradigm based on classical “billiard ball” physics (which still pervades our culture), but anyone who directly experiences the unified field at the source of their thinking process through TM knows that a new paradigm is on the rise: one that sees consciousness as the most fundamental element in the universe; to such a scientist, human awareness is as a field of limitless possibilities, where the vast range of benefits of TM are second nature and easy to accept because they are an everyday experience.

Tom

Read the abstract . “Our review included any study that was published in a peer-reviewed journal, used a control group, and reported outcomes related to changes in depression and anxiety”

This was not about cardiovascular outcomes. If they had been studying that topic then the study you mention would have been included, subject to meeting the inclusion criteria. As both a meditator and a scientist, this just looks like good review technique to me.

From personal experience, meditation really does help with anxiety but it shouldn’t be a primary cure. I believe it’s an excellent tool for preventing mental illness as well. It keeps things in balance as well as in perspective. I thoroughly enjoy it!

Meditation is indeed a great way to reach the level of seeing the

wholeness and inter-connectedness of things”

as you have so nicely explained it in you article. I also agree that by trying to use meditation as a direct cure, one somewhat lowers the aim of meditation and the results are probably not so good as those which come when really using meditation in the spirit of reaching the highest possible spiritual goals.

One of the basics of Buddhism is that there is suffering. In my experience depression is suffering. While meditation is not a cure for depression, I am changing the the way I think and how I live. It’s all happening too slowly for me so I assume it’s happening to slowly to to be considered a successful treatment but I’m not quitting.