Meditation Won’t Boost Health: 

HealthDay News should be embarrassed that their editors let this one slip out the portal.

Not only is their headline misleading and seemily untrue based on the research they are referencing,  it is an example of some of the worst tactics of web "Journalism" I have seen in the mainstream health reporting. Some bloggers are well known for starting fights and negative campaigns to generate controversy and develop traffic. But ,Jeezz Yahoo.

Take their lead-in sentence ….

"There’s no evidence that meditation eases health problems, according to an exhaustive review of the accumulated data by Canadian researchers.. "

Although more than 800 studies were included in the initial review, most were not of rigorous enough design to prove a therapeutic benefit for meditation, the researchers concluded.

“We can’t really draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of any of these treatments,” Bond tells WebMD.

Curious note: I could not find any reference to this study on WebMD. The one link that was supposely to an article on WebMD.com was dead.

Value of Meditation for Health Unproven

SOURCES: Ospina, M.B. Meditation Practices for Health: State of the Research, June 2007, prepared for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. …

The real problem is with the first sentence. There is plenty of evidence that meditation eases health problems. The study’s authors even make indirect reference to this.

Some of the studies suggested that certain types of meditation could help reduce blood pressure and stress and that yoga and other practices increased verbal creativity and reduced heart rate, blood pressure and cholesterol in healthy people.

But just in the abstract I found

the studies "showed that TM®, Qi Gong and Zen Buddhist meditation significantly reduced blood pressure. Yoga helped reduce stress."

Meta-analyses of results from 55 studies indicated that some meditation practices produced significant changes in healthy participants.

Sounds like a boost to health to me.

Now these were prefaced with the statement that the studies were low quality. But we will see that depending on the standard used, almost all complex behavioral studies would be found to be low quality. The difficulty of controlling for randomization and placebo effects ensures this, unless an unusually large budget was available ie.. hundreds of millions dollars. ( a couple of million does not go as far as it used to ;-).)

The issue is the quality of the evidence. There lies the rub.  One of the reviews of this study pointed out that one of the main reasons of the low quality scores was based on the weight used for a particular score that is used to evaluate research studies. This score is based on evaluating the extent to which the placebo effect is controlled for. Now it is one thing to give two doctors identical looking white pills one containing morphine and one with an inert compound to control for the placebo effect.  Then you can measure the effect of the two pills without the doctors or subjects knowing who got the medicine under study. In behavioral intervention studies it is much more complex and difficult to design. Many researchers have determined it is detrimental to even try.

There are a variety of work arounds that have been developed to try and derive meaningful result in the face of the placebo dilemma. However, it appears the studies were not evaluated for the application of these methods.

There are also allegations that a significant number of well controlled studies were left out of the review.

Dr. Schneider cited two studies published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 2005, which demonstrated that individuals with high blood pressure who were randomly assigned to TM groups had a 30% lower risk for mortality than controls. These studies should have been included in the AHRQ report, Dr. Schneider said, but were inexplicably excluded. In addition, 75 published studies were overlooked, even though these were sent to the authors by one of the reviewers.

Just think about what is involved in comparing 800+ widely divergent studies and trying to draw scientifically reliable conclusions. For a smaller scale example say you have 3 smaller studies with 50 to 100 subjects, they all have somewhat different designs, with their own strengths and weakness, and they find a small but significant beneficial impact on some measure, then you have one study that has 1000 participants, with its own weakness that finds no impact. How much weight to you apply to each? Well there is a whole field of study based on this and people a lot smarter then me will tell you that ,at least in the behavioral sciences, it is a very inexact science.

My take on this effort, it was probably a waste of time and money before it started.  

One of the researchers was quoted that the new report doesn’t prove that meditation has no therapeutic value, but it can inform medical practitioners that the "evidence is inconclusive regarding its effectiveness." 

My take on that is that their study was inconclusive. That does not mean that the evidence was not there but that their methods where not adequate to determine whether or not the evidence was significant. 

For the general public, the report "highlights that choosing to practice a particular meditation technique continues to rely solely on individual experiences and personal preferences, until more conclusive scientific evidence is produced," Ospina said.

My take on that is ????

Now I am confused, was the point of the research review to determine which meditation technique was MOST effective? Were they all somewhat effective?  These folks sound as confused as I feel right now.

In addition to the placebo effect, the other major confounding variable that effects all behavior science research is randomization. For some interesting reading on Ospina’s approach to the role of randomization in research surveys there is a PowerPoint presentation of a conference she moderated. 

This study was funded by the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Bethesda, Md., part of the National Institutes of Health, not an organization know to be particularly friendly to alternative medicine despite its name. 

Here is the other side of the medical spin doctors taking their shot

Now this is turning in to a fascinating study of social / medical research and vested interests and journalists vying for eyeballs.

 Medical News Today: Top Researchers Criticize New Meditation And Health Study

Their opening salvo?

A controversial new government-funded report, which found that meditation does not improve health, is methodologically flawed, incomplete, and should be retracted.

This is the consensus of a growing number of researchers in the U.S. and abroad who have reviewed the report and are critical of its conclusions.

While this may be a populist uprising of well endowded researchers againist big phama and mainstream medicine, without deeper research it could also be a half a dozen tenured researchers trying to protect their turf.

That hyperploe laden statement appears to be solely based on a press release by Maharishi University of Management.

Now this organization definitively has a horse in this race.  From their site referring to their research in this area:

Many of these published studies have received wide-scale media coverage in hundreds of newspaper, magazine articles, and television and radio shows.
Ongoing collaborative clinical trials include the effects of the Transcendental Meditation program on:

* physiological mechanisms of hypertension
* cardiovascular morbidity and mortality
* primary prevention of hypertension
* regression of atherosclerosis (coronary artery disease)
* pathophysiological mechanisms of coronary heart disease
* comparisons with other behavioral modalities in cardiovascular disease
* quality of life and survival rates in breast cancer patients
* neurophysiology, cognitive development and health in college students

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a component of the National Institutes of Health, awarded Maharishi University of Management an $8 million grant from 1999–2006. The purpose of the grant was to establish a specialized center of research (SCOR) to study natural medicine in relation to cardiovascular disease in minority populations.

Based on more than 20 years of research and clinical experience with the evidence-based, natural medicine approaches to cardiovascular disease, Dr. Robert Schneider and Dr. Jeremy Fields have published a widely-acclaimed popular book, TOTAL HEART HEALTH; How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease with the Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health (Basic Health Publications, 2006).

Click here for press release (PDF)

review critical of study

TOP RESEARCHERS CRITICAL OF AHRQ REPORT
Available for Interview

C. Noel Bairey Merz, M.D., F.A.C.C., F.A.H.A

Medical Director and Endowed Chair, Women’s Health Program,
Preventive Cardiac and Women’s Heart Centers
at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Los Angeles

Robert Schneider, M.D., F.A.C.C.

Director, NIH-Funded Institute of Natural Medicine and Prevention
Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa

Hector Myers, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology
at the University of California at Los Angeles

Vernon Barnes, Ph.D.

Research Scientist in the Department of Pediatrics
at the Medical College of Georgia
Augusta, Georgia

Professor Harald Walach

University of Northampton School of Social Sciences
Samueli Institute for Information

Click here for Prof. Walach’s review

Click here for Dr. Walton’s review (PDF)

More information

a Pro Meditation forum discussion on this

A skeptical  Meditation Forum discussion on this

More to come later

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