Mindfulness meditation is gaining more and more credibility as a practice that can have significant health and psychological benefits. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, funding agencies are beginning to look favorably on granting money for really expensive, difficult, and high-powered studies on mindfulness meditation. Researchers at major universities are getting grants from the National Institute of Health, and amazing results are being brought forth, demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness on physical and psychological health.
Practices that may once have been viewed as "hippy dippy" and esoteric activities are presently being used in clinics, hospital, mental health centers, prisons, youth centers, and corporations. Medical doctors and neuroscientists, themselves, have become serious mindfulness meditation practitioners. After experiencing the profound personal benefits, they are studying the methods at neuroscience labs of universities such as Harvard and other prominent universities.
Inflammation is an important and popular topic in medicine. It involves an activation of the immune system in response to infection, irritation, or injury. It is characterized by an influx of white blood cells, pain, swelling, heat and redness, and dysfunction of the organs involved. The diseases that it causes have different names when they appear in different parts of the body.
In David Mendosa's article, Inflammation: The Root of Diabetes, published at http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/73865/inflammation-root in June 2009, he discusses the strong evidence supporting the relationship of inflammation to type 2 diabetes. He includes Challem's Anti-inflammation Food Pyramid Chart for suggestions in creating an anti-inflammatory eating program.
Charles Raison M.D. of Emory University is involved in studying the possible ways which meditation practice is helpful for stress-related medical and emotional conditions. He says that stressful events and circumstances set off alarms within our nervous system, our endocrine system, and also in the form of an inflammatory response. If they occur frequently or over long periods of time, they can wreak havoc in our minds and bodies and contribute to or cause serious diseases. The inflammatory response has also been linked to disorders including cancer, depression, and arthritis.
Dr. Raison has been particularly interested in seeing whether mediation results in a reduction in the inflammatory responses associated with social stressors. In a study performed by Dr. Raison and his colleagues, participants were randomized either to training in loving-kindness meditation (compassion meditation) or an active control group (health discussion group). They were then subjected to an intense social stressor. Physiological measures were interleukin (IL)-6 (inflammatory marker) and cortisol, a stress hormone. Dr. Raison and his colleagues found that compassion meditation diminished the inflammatory reactivity to the psychosocial sttress http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18835662.
