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Mind Over Pain
Reducing Pain in Chronic diseases
© Devorah Stone

The Use of Mindfulness Therapies to Reduce the Pain of Fibromyalgia and Cancer
“I try to slow my breathing and think of the pain burning up and leaving my body.” This is what Jennifer Akers, a caseworker, writer and mother, does when fibromyalgia, a chronic illness characterised by widespread pain and fatigue usually in the muscles, tendons and ligaments, overwhelms her. Sometimes her physician’s painkillers are ineffective so she uses a less conventional weapon in her war against pain.

Medication and traditional medicine are often futile against the pain. Meditation and visualization mindfulness techniques are offering hope for the estimated 100 million Americans, mostly women, who suffer from fibromyalgia pain, fatigue and sleep disturbance.

A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin recruited 69 women with the chronic condition. They took a two-month course learning stress reduction and meditation techniques. All the women in the study reported significant reduction in pain symptoms, disability, and sleep disturbance.

This isn’t the only study to obtain these results. Seventy women took part in a study using stress reduction meditation by The Arthritis-Fibromyalgia Center, of Newton Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts. Fifty-one percent showed moderate to marked improvements. In a similar study at the Center for Integrative Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, patients who took an eight-week course of thirty -minute meditation daily experienced a 44% reduction in anxiety.