The linked JAMA study does not show the opioid reduction was 75%.
In fact, to quote, “ The findings suggest that MBTs are associated with moderate improvements in pain and small reductions in opioid dose and may be associated with therapeutic benefits for opioid-related problems, such as opioid craving and misuse. Future studies should carefully quantify opioid dosing variables to determine the association of mind-body therapies with opioid-related outcomes.”
I will dig into this more this evening - chronic pain management is my area - but on first glance, this is a bullshit clickbait headline.
Meditation Reduced The Opioid Dose She Needs To Ease Chronic Pain By 75%.
It's the story of how one user was able to supplement a smaller dose of opioids with other therapies and reduce her need for opioids. The title as is makes an extraordinary claim never made by the article and as such is a lie. It would be great if we didn't mislead our readers to get them to click a link.
People that are surprised by this should consider investing more in their meditation practices. Meditation has a way of making your emotional and physical state data the mind considers instead of a force that drives the mind.
This is a cool way to think about it. Basically, thoughts and feelings are revealed to just be more data points in our experience, instead of the sum of our entire experience.
Was laying in a park this weekend on a below freezing night with a friend who's been doing TM. I meditate pretty regularly, but never tried a mantra. Anyways, I feeling very cold and ready to go inside, but after a few minutes of meditation, I felt warm again. Meditation definitely increases my tolerance of uncomfortable conditions.
Yikes. My memory is faulty then. I will have to rewatch it. (He’s still a bit of a freak of nature though, that much I’m sure about. (At least I think I am.))
I wish I had the link of this BBC video journalist from years ago who wanted to bust the myth of the Himalayan swamis in India who meditate for days without eating food in freezing temperatures. He came back a convert when he witnessed with his own eyes how they do it with so much ease while not wearing much cloth on their bodies.
Every single session when I sit to meditate I have to take off enough clothes to be cold because if I don't I will burn up. No one has ever been able to tell me why that is or if I was alone: it's nice to know there's someone else out there for who experiences a similar affect.
You are not alone :-) Many meditators experience this.
This is true for any meditation with or without mantra. Mantra meditation with audible chanting creates enough vibrations to heat up body cells. Meditation also raises the internal energy and hence many experience the heating effect.
The other night I had my first real case of heartburn due to a poor choice of meal. Unfortunately I had no medication on hand so I just tossed and turned on the bed. I was trying my best to alleviate the pain so I could sleep. I tried to focus away from the pain and for moments it felt like the pain dulled down. I was pondering if this is something that those skilled at mediating can do by reducing the pain just by the mind.
I've done exactly the opposite and have had some success and some failures.
I've had headaches where I focus 100% on the pain and try to objectively think about the sensation - where it is and exactly how it feels. I've found that often the pain fades away because I can't really pin it down.
On the other hand, if I do the same things with a mildly upset stomach, I can pretty much always make myself barf.
I do the same thing when having a headache. Focusing on the pain and all the details about it causes the pain to get weaker, I keep focusing on it, "digging it out", untill it subsides. Thinking about anything other than pain does not cause relief. Interesting. I have noticed some benefits of motionlessly sitting, breathing slowly but deeply and replaying the day in the evening to relax and improve my socialization. This is different to the usual anxiety of ruminating on past thoughts, for me at least. In the end I am tired but feel in control and decisive, self confident. It makes it super easy to fall asleep!
The highest form of meditation can even make you conscious of your internal hormones and can give you fine-tuned control on how you secrete various hormones.
Requiring commenters to assume good faith and attack the strongest possible version of the argument is a wonderful tool to keep discussion civil and productive.
I don't see how this can possibly by applied to the internet at large which is absolutely full of loud evil people operating in bad faith.
HN is a large enough sample that I don't think it's so different from humans in general, including internet humans in general. If that's right, then the differences you're talking about are mostly contextual.
In this context, we do much better by practicing the guidelines in relation to everyone, even article authors. The point is not that we owe them that, but that we owe ourselves that, because it's how we can maintain our community together.
I respectfully disagree that internet humans are a representative sample of humans or that HN humans represent a sample of internet humans. In both cases the sample isn't random.
Perhaps overly optimistically I believe both samples are on average better than the overall population. People that have access to an internet connection have on average a better chance of also having access to an education. People that read hacker news are on average more likely to be the type who have the desire to read and comprehend a topic more so than the average person who often desires no more than a shallow understanding of what they believe will directly effect themselves and their fortunes.
I do think we often speak more frankly OF people than TO them even when being civil. I can think of a fair number of people where honest dialogue regarding them or their ideas would be at best insulting no matter how neutrally one proposed to conduct one self. Wherein these people literally promote evil not speaking plainly is a greater ill than being unkind.
Article's written by such folks are literally all over the net but rarely if ever appear on the main page for Hacker News. You have I'm sure more insight than I about whether they are submitted in the first place. I guess you can say its practicable to be decent to one another in an environment composed by a great than average concentration of decent people wherein all the really indecent people are either discouraged from entering in the first place or excluded thereafter.
An ad to prop up big pharma by suggesting that people cut their opioid use by 75%?
Lets assume that this is an ad to prop up big pharma. Something between 1 of the 2 following extremes happens.
1. Every opioid user takes up meditation, and is able to reduce their opioid use by 75%. This would generally be considered a very good thing, even though it would cost big pharma 75% of their opioid profits.
2. The woman in the article is the only person in the world with this reported success, nothing changes.
Are you suggesting that forces at play are hoping that the second happens, yet all the lawsuits and criminal investigations against opioid manufacturers and distributors will go away, in part due to articles like this, despite the lack of change in numbers?
For medications under patent, it really doesn't matter if the standard dose is 10mg or 100mg, the standard dose will have the chosen price. Since they sometimes have to sell both dosages at two different prices per mg, they also need bribes to try to make pill splitting illegal either in general or at least in medicare. With opioids "additives to prevent abuse" are also a great way to prevent pill splitting.
I should probably add that no matter how jaded one is, the field of applying meditation to pain in Western medicine predates any newer interests by big pharma. Jon Kabat-Zinn has some good research stretching back to 1980.
Meditation will never gain mass acceptance or practice no matter how many more of these articles we see.
People seem to forget there is a huge percentage of the population that will never meditate or can't meditate due to extenuating circumstances.
While this article is interesting it's not helpful for this subsection of the population.
For them it is far more beneficial to seek alternative therapies like rTMS, tDCS, tACS, and DBS tech, of which meditation is probably a self propelled variant.
It is well known that these technologies have analgesic effects and modulate brain state with desirable outcomes, just like meditation.
They have the added benefit of also being directly applicable to nerve branch areas/PNS in the body itself and not just the brain. So they go beyond meditation and what is possible with meditation.
>People seem to forget there is a huge percentage of the population that will never meditate or can't meditate due to extenuating circumstances.
This is just a restatement of what you said in your first line, but again it's just an assertion: "they won't do it" - well okay, why won't they? Is it because they feel they don't have enough time? Then we must give them more time. Is it because they have little regard for their mental health? Then tell them the dangers of letting mental health go unchecked. Is it because they are averse to it because they see it as a satanic ritual? Then we must educate them.
Only a small amount of the population engages in any behavior that requires active lifestyle modification. Exercise and diet are hardly adhered to despite being relatively simple. Meditation has the added difficulty of being solitary, and, for most, boring and difficult (compared to the instant-feedback world surrounding them).
I think that fits into the wider goal of educating people to care for their health for their own good; clearly the methods we're using don't work, and haven't adapted to the world in which you could be doing a million other things. Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing, you can easily escalate how much time you spend and plan accordingly. The answer isn't to give up on them.
Most people won't live their lives intentionally no matter what you do. It's a noble goal to increase the number from, say, 10% to 20%. But getting even a majority of people are going to 'care for their health for their own good' is demonstrably impossible. At best you can turn self-care into a game or entertainment, but extrinsic motivation is kind of the exact opposite of the practice of meditation.
One of the groups that wash out of meditation immediately are those who it turns out are afraid of being alone with their own thoughts. These could be dark thoughts, or they could just be the sort of person who always fills the silence in a conversation (for that reason or a myriad of others).
I went on a long trip with someone who thought I wouldn't make it 3 days without the internet. Turned out they were the one who needed the fix on day 3. You can't really see what's going on in someone else's head so you don't know how they will react to having to entertain themselves without props, until they do it.
It's not just culturally routine, but culturally shamed for not adhering. Additionally, it does not take much time at all. Meditation requires more investment in time by a factor of 10 at least, and if you shame someone for not meditating, they'll probably laugh at you or give you a bewildered look.
I have friends who are, but when GP said "a large percentage of the population", I assumed they weren't specifically talking about clinically depressed people, who don't make up a large percentage of the population. Meditation isn't a cure and it's not equivalent to therapy, so people who are depressed should consider doing things as prescribed by a psychiatrist. Their issues with motivation (such as avolition) aren't issues for most people who don't meditate. Time and addiction to instant gratification probably are.
Meditation and chronic pain have a bad history due to some unhelpful dogma that pervades the meditation community. Many teachers insist on seated meditation in a position that requires flexibility and only works for people without circulatory issues (heart problems, diabetes) or back problems.
For instance in Seattle, I believe the Rinzai school may be the only one that volunteers multiple affordances rather than forcing the student to ask for them, or rejecting them out of hand. It's not just bullshit, it's cruelty.
I didn't make it anywhere with meditation until I encountered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhan_zhuang and figured out it's standing meditation. (If the arms up hurts, put them on your thighs). You can also just practice laying in bed, which is also good for insomnia.
In fact, to quote, “ The findings suggest that MBTs are associated with moderate improvements in pain and small reductions in opioid dose and may be associated with therapeutic benefits for opioid-related problems, such as opioid craving and misuse. Future studies should carefully quantify opioid dosing variables to determine the association of mind-body therapies with opioid-related outcomes.”
I will dig into this more this evening - chronic pain management is my area - but on first glance, this is a bullshit clickbait headline.