Zen Meditation May Help To Heal Chronic Back Pain: Study

Back pain can be treated most effectively with Zen meditation, mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive behavioral therapy, according to researchers.

A team at Johns Hopkins University said that more than 65 million Americans have chronic lower back pain, which makes it the second most common cause of disability in the United States. This kind of disability can be difficult to treat as the underlying reasons may not be clear.

Studying 342 adults between 20 to 70 years, all of whom experienced chronic lower back pain, helped them to arrive at the conclusion that meditation is a great healer. Experts divided the participants into three different groups: mindfulness-based stress reduction, cognitive behavioral therapy, and conventional care.

The first group was trained in mindfulness meditation and yoga, and the second in altering pain-related thoughts and behaviors for two-hour weekly sessions for two months. The third group received the usual conventional care.

After 26 weeks, it was found that the first two groups showed a significant reduction in their back pain symptoms as compared to the third group.

About 61 percent of the mindfulness group, 58 percent of the cognitive behavior therapy group and 44 percent of the conventional group exhibited clinically meaningful improvement after 26 weeks.

"Among adults with chronic low back pain, both mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive behavioral therapy resulted in greater improvement in back pain and functional limitations at 26 and 52 weeks when compared with usual care. There were no meaningful differences in outcomes between mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive behavioral therapy," researchers wrote in the study.

"These findings suggest that mindfulness-based stress reduction may be an effective treatment option for patients with chronic low back pain," they concluded.

"Although understanding the specificity of treatment effects, mechanisms of action, and the role of mediators are important issues for researchers, they are merely academic for many clinicians and their patients. For patients with chronic painful conditions, options are needed to help them live with less pain and disability now," write Dr. Madhav Goyal and Jennifer A. Haythornthwaite of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore. They were not involved in the study.

The findings and the accompanying editorial were published in the journal JAMA.