Nov. 11, 2009 -- A mini-course in meditation may be all it takes
to assist in pain management. A new study shows as little as an
hour of mindfulness training is enough to "We knew already that
meditation has significant effects on pain perception in long-
term practitioners whose brains seem to have been completely
changed -- we didn't know that you could do this in just three
days, with just 20 minutes a day," says researcher Fadel Zeidan,
a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of North
Carolina, Charlotte, in a news release. "Not only did the
meditation subjects feel less pain than the control group while
meditating, but they also experienced less pain sensitivity
while not meditating," says Zeidan. In the study, published in
the Journal of Pain, a group of 22 college students received
three, 20-minute mindfulness training sessions over the course
of three days. In three different experiments, researchers
compared their responses to mild electrical shocks to the
forearm with the responses of a