Meditation as a complement to conventional treatments

Today, several public and private health facilities – the majority of which are in the United States – incorporate meditation into their therapeutic program.¹. The meditation technique suggested is generally the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), that is, stress reduction based on mindfulness meditation. This technique was introduced by the American psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn². This meditation technique encourages welcoming and observing stressful moments in everyday life without judging them. The usual reaction is to want to run away from negative emotions by getting absorbed in an activity or thinking about something else, but this would tend to make them worse. Practicing MBSR daily would thus stimulate the parts of the brain that play a role in the memorization process, the regulation of emotions, or the ability to take a step back, so that patients can enjoy life, regardless of the circumstances.³.

Meditation as a full-fledged treatment

Generally speaking, meditation would stimulate the activity of the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain which is responsible for positive feelings such as empathy, self-esteem or happiness, while decreasing negative feelings like stress, anger or anxiety. In addition, it would reduce the sensations of pain thanks to its action on the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula and the thalamus. For example, experienced practitioners of Zen meditation have developed increased resistance to pain.². This assumes that nothing prevents a sick person from practicing meditation independently and autonomously, but it requires significant regularity, great motivation and above all, time.

In fact, it should be remembered that meditation allows above all to accompany the patient towards the acceptance of his disease to support it in the most comfortable way possible. Reducing sensitivity to pain or stress, for example, does not eliminate the cause of the pain or the disease. It does not therefore cure the disease directly, but it can breathe another way of seeing it, a state of mind which can promote healing. It can all the same with difficulty replace conventional treatment, especially since these do not always allow access to “cure”, in the sense of a return to the state which preceded the disease. The two approaches are therefore complementary.

N. Garnoussi, Mindfulness or meditation for healing and personal growth: psychospiritual tinkering in mental medicine, cairn.info, 2011 C. André, La méditation de plein conscience, Cerveau & Psycho n ° 41, 2010 MJ Ott, Mindfulness meditation: a path of transformation & healing, J Psychosoc Nurs Ment Health Serv, 2004