Meditation Can Significantly Reduce Migraines

Meditation Can Significantly Reduce Migraines

A recent study published in the journal Headache proposed meditation as a way to better deal with migraine related pain. The research team that worked on the study was from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The team took 19 volunteers with frequent migraines and assigned part of them to medical care while the rest to an eight week long program called mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), that uses yoga and meditation techniques to relieve headaches. The group that chose the MBSR techniques meditated for a total of 30 minutes each day.

The results were impressive as patients who worked with meditation had 1.4 fewer headaches per month. While, due to small number of participants that result isn’t significant, a truly amazing discovery was the reduction in headache duration by the MBSR participants by close to three hours under the support group.

Rebecca Irwin Wells, MD and assistant professor of neurology at Wake Forest Baptist Church said that being able to shorten the duration of their migraines gave patients a sense of  “personal control.” She also added that several other studies have shown that mindfulness meditation is a natural way to reduce stress, one of the biggest triggers of migraines. A review published in JAMA Internal Medicine has also found that mindfulness meditation can help with depression and anxiety.

Posted by George Daniels on Sunday September 14 2014, 3:30 AM EDT. Ref: Time. Link. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0