Sunday, April 18, 2010

Meditation may be much more effective than drugs in treating heart disease: A Recent Study

A recent study (and the first of its kind) presented at the annual American Heart Association’s conference last year (11/09) that revealed an almost 50% reduction in heart attack, stroke, and death in heart disease patients practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM). This study was sponsored by the NIH with a $3.8 million grant and conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin and was a randomized controlled trial lasting nine years following 201 test participants.



The fascinating thing about this first-ever, government-sponsored study was that no drug, surgery, or combination of treatments for heart disease has ever been researched to reduce heart disease risks up to 50% and all it took for these patients was practice in TM.

Here are some interesting facts regarding heart disease:

  • Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in the United States


  • There are nearly 1.5 million heart attacks per year in the United States, according to the American Heart Association


  •  An American will suffer a heart attack every 34 seconds


  •  Coronary heart disease is also the leading cause of health care costs. More than $475 billion is spent annually on treating CHD, including: $100,000 for each coronary bypass surgery, $50,000 for each angioplasty, and $30,000 for each diagnostic cardiac catheterization.


  • There are nearly 500,000 coronary artery bypass grafts and 1.3 million angioplasties performed every year.


  • Stress is thought to contribute to the development of CHD.



Transcendental Meditation is but one approach to meditation and this study opens the doorway for the newer perspective that a meditative/contemplative practice may be a more effective alternative to the typical prescriptive treatments for heart disease.

TAKE HOME MESSAGE:  Meditation practice is effective for the treatment of heart disease.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

TM is but one approach, but this study was not about other approaches, it was about TM. The emerging paradigm in science is that all meditation practices do not yield the same results. Not all meditations techniques are about transcending, some are just about relaxation or trying to gain insight. TM is a technique for transcending thinking and experiencing pure consciousness, and that produces different results.

UNKNOWN said...

I was reading some of your content on this website gamma-Butyrolactone