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To Meditate of Medicate?
While folk belonging to Buddhist and Hindu traditions
have known the value of meditation from time
immemorial, it is only recently that western medicine has
learned that meditation can actually be good for patients.
According to a recent issue of Time magazine, no less than ten
million Americans today admit to practicing some form of
meditation.
It was Dr. Herbert Benson, professor of medicine at Harvard who
appraised the medical establishment of the benefits of meditation.
In 1967 he studied a group of 36 meditators – measuring heart rate, blood pressure and body
temperature while they meditated – and demonstrated that meditation significantly reduced resting
heart rate and metabolic rate. “All that I did,” said Benson, “was simply provide a scientific
explanation for techniques that people have been using for thousands of years.”
Subsequently, other researchers ‘scientifically’ studied the physiological effects of meditation. In
Cambridge, for example, John Teasdale showed that meditation benefited those suffering from
psychological depression – halving the relapse rate among the depressed patients in his study.
Boosting the immune system
Meditation has also been shown to boost the body’s immune system. In two groups of subjects
given flu vaccine in the University of Wisconsin, the group who were meditators had higher levels
of antibodies in their bloody compared to the non-meditating group – implying that their level of
resistance to this disease was better.
Several studies have established beyond doubt that regular
meditation can significantly lower blood pressure. Says
American cardiologists Dr. Dean Ornish, “If you want to
prevent build up of cholesterol plaques in your arteries, start
meditating.”
Ornish is not the only physician recommending meditation to
his patients. Patients today are being recommended meditation
as a method of preventing or controlling chronic diseases such
as cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure.
How does meditation produce these therapeutic
effects?
Modern MRI scans and other means of tracking blood flow and
electrical activity have shown that meditation virtually rewires the brain to reduce stress, raising the
threshold at which an individual reacts to perceived irritations. If one looks on the brain as
analogous to a pressure cooker set to build up pressure in a confined space and release steam at a
particular temperature, what meditating does is reset the boiling point – so that tolerance level is
raise and one does not explode in the face of external annoyances.
Physiologically, meditation deactivates the Frontal lobe of the brain (which receives and processes
sensory information and is responsible for reasoning and emotional awareness) and the Parietal
lobe (responsible for orienting a person in space and time). With these two lobes functioning
‘offline’, as it were, one loses one’s sense of self and the emotional awareness of outside
sensations. The brain does not shut itself off – it simply blocks
information unnecessarily going into the frontal and parietal
lobes and creating unwanted physiological activity.
Benson showed the meditating increased Theta waves (that
appear just before one falls asleep) in the brains of meditators
without them actually falling asleep. He postulated that this
created a sense of calmness, thus allowing them to overcome the
body’s natural stress response – the ‘fight or flight’ reaction to
the perception of external danger or irritation – and so achieve a
calmer, more contented state of mind.
Perhaps this is the essence of Buddhist philosophy – training oneself to focus on the present, to live
in the moment – and not to allow past and future worries to set off the ‘reactionary’ systems that
potentiate disease.
Dr. Sanjiva Wijesinha MBBS MSc (Oxon) FRCS FRACGP is a senior lecturer in the Medical
Faculty at Melbourne’s Monash University as well as Sri Lanka’s Kelaniya University.