Researchers probe value of mindfulness
Buddhist meditation looked at by uOttawa study as way to ease pain
University of Ottawa researchers are studying an ancient meditation technique and what it has to teach about treating modern problems, from relieving chronic pain to helping students de-stress.
The new Academy for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies is probing the uses of mindfulness, a practice that has roots in 2,600-year-old Buddhist teachings.
Mindfulness teaches practitioners how to focus on the present moment, accepting feelings, thoughts, and sensations without judgment. Its applications in Western medicine began with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a medical professor at the University of Massachusetts who stripped the metaphysical overtones from the practice and integrated it into stress reduction treatment.
Kabat-Zinn’s work started to get attention about 30 years ago. Research on mindfulness has exploded since then. It has been used to help prevent the relapse of depression. Workers at Google and IMB can take courses on it. You can get a master’s degree in mindfulnessbased cognitive therapy at Oxford University. In the U.S., the MindUP program aims at improving behaviour and learning in elementary school classrooms. The University of Ottawa has integrated mindfulness into medical school. It’s now a compulsory part of the program.
The new academy is a way to link researchers who are already looking into different applications for mindfulness, says psychologist Dr. Diana Koszycki, a professor of education and medicine and a senior researcher at the Montfort Hospital.
Essentially, mindfulness trains the brain to get off the hamster wheel. “Our brains aren’t wired to multi-task. Giving something your full attention helps improve levels of stress,” says Koszycki, who is studying whether mindfulness can help reduce social anxiety, a condition where people feel overly selfconscious about social situations.
“A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. When people’s minds wander, they’re ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. Rather than suppressing negative emotions, mindfulness lets you observe emotions in a detached way.”
At the University of Ottawa, mindfulness sessions are a mandatory part of the first two years of medical study. Students receive eight short lectures and perform exercises in meditation. The classes often end with a poem.
Mindfulness helps students destress, empathize with patients and develop resilience, says Dr. Heather MacLean, a neurologist who is the co-director of the preclerkship medical program.
“If a physician is unwell, burned out or depressed, they’re more likely to make patient errors. And patients are less likely to be satisfied,” she says. “Empathetic doctors are more likely to get therapeutic results for patients.”
When students enter medical school, they take a short “mindfulness inventory” survey. The answers are used as a baseline to compare responses at the end of the program.
“The feedback from the students has been overwhelmingly positive,” says MacLean. “There are a few outliers who said, ‘I would rather have this time to study.’ But it doesn’t have to resonate with everybody. This is just one path to well-being.”
Dr. Howard Nathan, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Ottawa and a pain specialist at The Ottawa Hospital, used mindfulness in research funded by the Canadian Diabetes Association on diabetic neuropathy, which causes a burning sensation in the feet.
Traditionally, doctors have sought to isolate the cause of pain and heal it in the hopes of eliminating it. But for patients with chronic pain, the nervous system is constantly bombarded by pain inputs. Pain medication is considered successful if it reduces pain by 30 per cent. “We don’t have much to offer patients,” says Nathan.
Mindfulness is low cost and there are no side-effects. He thinks of it as “brain retraining.”
In his study, Nathan had two groups of diabetic patients: a control group and a group that took a generic eight-week mindfulness course. They learned to become objective observers of their own pain. “When you take position of a witness, it stops the pain’s power over you.,” he says. “I describe it like a burning house. You’re not in the burning house. You step outside and let it burn. The house is still burning, but you don’t feel trapped.”
The group that took mindfulness training reported a drop in the intensity of pain and improved quality of life. The control group showed little change.
Nathan says he was a skeptic. “But to my surprise, the results were more positive than I thought they would be.”
Dr. Marlon Danilewitz was a yoga and mindfulness instructor before he became a medical student and researcher at the University of Ottawa. He graduated in 2015 and is now doing a residency in psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, where he and other researchers are exploring combining mindfulness training with electrical stimulation known as transcranial direct current stimulation.
“I found that mindfulness dovetailed with my interest in mental health,” says Danilewitz.
“It definitely helps me to be present in conversations.”
Mindfulness can be transformative, says Koszycki. “But you have to stick with the practice. Even 15 minutes a day can be beneficial, but 45 minutes is considered optimal. You have to do the whole program to benefit from it.”
But she also warns that research has been inconclusive. “A lot of research is based on small samples. We’re encouraged, but we have to design studies using large samples.”
Nathan thinks of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, as the Albert Einstein of pain psychology. “Buddha figured out how suffering was processed in the mind through introspection. Some 2,600 years later, we can see that the brain works the way he saw it intuitively.”