has anyone tried mindfulness meditation for chronic pain management?

i've heard some very good things about it as a suppliment / alternative to pain medications.

i have had good results with it myself...

anyone else?

[JonB]

I've recently been trying this and have found it helpful in many ways. I do some guided meditations and some without. Some formal sit-down sessions and some throughout the day stuff. I've done a lot of reading about it and I find it very interesting. Even more interesting now that it's helping with the pain and other things too. Meditation is my new thing.

[(JD)]

Yes....for many years. It's an ongoing "event" and not something just "learned" and abandoned.

Mindfulness is good for all of us at all times, imo. Though few can maintain it with the "world" attacking, imo. It's being fully "mindful" of where you are right now... what you are doing right now... and with the meditation aspect, it includes thinking about your breath (breathing) and clearing your mind of thought... imo...

Being in the here and now is good for depression too, I think. Because so much of depression is remembering past negativity and projecting dark futures... but often the very here and now is ok. Right now...sitting here... typing this... drinking my limeade... I'm ok.

TC

[Perna]

Lots of good "clinical" evidence these days: http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/research/findings.aspx

[RainbowFaerie]

Yes, it does help, the more I read and practice the easier it gets. Good books on meditation/mindfulness:

It's Easier Than You Think - Sylvia Boorstein

Peace Is Every Step - Thich Nhat Hanh

The Practice of the Presence of God - Brother Lawrence

Meditation - Eknath Easwaran

Namaste,
RainbowFaerie

[Larry_Hoover]

I rely on mindfulness and meditation for pain control/coping. My body decided that oxycodone was toxic, despite my having successfully used it for eighteen months, so I had to discontinue narcotics altogether. That left me to manage my complex regional pain syndrome using psychological modalites alone. It turns out that I am very good at it (as shown by biofeedback). I can raise the temperature in my fingertips by five degrees, just by thinking it so. I never would have guessed how important cognitive processing (or the absence of it) is in pain management. Counteracting the fear response is very important, in my own experience of pain. Accepting the pain, and not locking into an emotional response to it, allows the pain to "move on".

Lar

[wisewoman]

wow Larry, I guess I had better do more research on this. Did you do it with a group? How did you learn? I am on methadone and neurontin now which is amazing for my pain. I am doing things I have not been able to do in a very long time.

Would biofeedback work with my breathing which is horrendous right now?

[Larry_Hoover]

Last fall, I found myself stuck between new adverse reactions to my opiate painkillers (oxycodone), and the pain. I was in withdrawal, despite a stable dose. I was stuck between the pain of the pain, and the pain of withdrawal. It's called Downhill Spiral Syndrome, and down I went. I had to do full withdrawal on my own, despite the pain itself. And the blackness of my mood was without parallel. I was able to find anecdotal accounts on the Internet which precisely paralleled my experience, or I'd have thought I had gone insane.

At the time this all happened, I was in a pain rehab program, which was designed to expand functioning by pushing the boundaries gradually. Good on paper, but it came at a bad time, what with this other thing going on. I collapsed.

The pain rehab people got me referred to a psychologist who only deals with pain. He's a Buddhist, and he has his own slant on meditation. It happened to coincide very well with my own perceptions. His meditation centres on breathing. You always are breathing, despite anything else you may be doing/feeling/thinking. It's an excellent "home" concept, bringing you back to the simple tidal flow of air. I don't know what you mean by saying that your breathing is horrendous right now, but my own asthma has reduced since I started meditating this way.

The biofeedback was added in after he was assured that my meditation was up to par. The first time he hooked me up to skin conductance and temp sensors, and I began to meditate, the charts of those variables showed dramatic changes. It gave me a concrete experience of what I could only have intuitively grasped about mindfulness itself. By the third session, I could raise my skin temp while engaged in spirited conversation. I got my finger tips up to 96.3 F. He'd never seen anybody do that before. I'm in to see him again tomorrow, and I'll ask about breathing......if there's something more you'd like to add, so I understand more clearly?

Lar

[(JD)]

Good points! Yes, breathing is a component of pain and pain relief.... humans tend to hold their breath when they are in pain, and thus create more pain in their muscles (which NEED oxygen too!)