Mindfulness Meditation May Ease Low Back Pain, Study Finds

There are 65 million Americans who suffer from chronic back pain. Many of these patients tried everything from physiotherapy to taking painkillers and none of them worked fully. However, there's a good news.

Meditation may work better than painkillers when it comes to easing chronic low back pain, a new clinical trial finds.

The study discovered that a program called mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) were more effective than standard medical care for relieving low back pain.

Roughly six months after the beginning of the study, the people who joined the meditation program were more likely to experience at least a 30 percent improvement in their ability to implement daily activities, compared with the people who gotm only standard treatments for low back pain, such as taking medicine.

"We are excited about these results, because chronic low back pain is such a common problem and can be disabling and difficult to treat," said study leader Daniel Cherkin, a senior investigator at Group Health Research Institute, a nonprofit health care organization in Seattle.

Along with previous studies, "I believe that there is enough evidence…to say that MBSR is a reasonable treatment option," for patients to start now, Cherkin told Live Science. "It is relatively safe and may improve people's life beyond just back pain," Cherkin said.

However, Cherkin said that like every other treatments for back pain, MBSR may not work equally for everyone. And more research is necessary to check how long the effects can last — the researchers were not able predict the effects of MSRB beyond one year.

Patients with chronic painful conditions need more ways to ease pain and disability now, wrote authors from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in an accompanying journal editorial. They complimented the new study's exceptional quality and its "compelling argument for ensuring that an evidence-based health care system should provide access to affordable mind-body therapies."

The study is published in today's (March 22) issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.