For centuries, mindfulness Attention This has been a useful practice for people wanting to deal with chronic pain. But there has long been a question: Does meditation actually reduce pain, or is it merely acting as a placebo? A recent study involving brain scans now provides clarity, suggesting that mindfulness meditation activates unique brain mechanisms associated with the placebo effect.

Researchers led by Dr. Fadel Zidan, professor of anesthesiology at the University of California, San Diego, conducted the study to determine how mindfulness meditation affects pain perception in the brain. Their findings indicate that mindfulness meditation can directly reduce pain without relying on placebo effects.

The study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, involved 115 healthy participants who were randomly divided into four treatment groups. The first group practiced actual mindfulness meditation, focusing on their breathing without judgment. The second group engaged in a “sham” meditation practice involving deep breathing, which lacked mindfulness elements. The third group was given a placebo cream, with participants trained to believe it would reduce pain, while the fourth group served as a control by listening to an audiobook.

To test pain responses in each group, researchers applied a painful but harmless heat stimulus to the participants’ feet and used brain scans to observe their reactions. The results showed that both the placebo cream and sham meditation helped reduce the perceived pain to some extent. However, mindfulness meditation performed significantly better than both, providing a significant reduction in pain.

Brain scans revealed that mindfulness meditation reduced coherence between certain brain regions associated with introspection, self-awareness, and emotional regulation, collectively known as the neural pain signature (NPS). This pattern of brain activity is commonly seen in individuals experiencing pain, characterizing it as a signature response to discomfort. The effect of mindfulness meditation was to disrupt this NPS network, thereby altering the perception of pain.

Interestingly, neither placebo cream nor sham meditation changed the NPS network in the same way. Instead, these treatments activated different brain systems that did not overlap with pathways engaged during mindfulness meditation. This dissociation of brain activity supports the idea that mindfulness meditation offers a unique way to manage pain that is not based on placebo responses.

Dr. Zidane explained, “It has long been believed that the placebo effect overlaps with the brain mechanisms triggered by active treatments, such as mindfulness meditation, but these results show that when it comes to pain , then this cannot be the case.”

These findings have important implications for pain management, as modern medicine typically evaluates new treatments based on whether they perform better than placebo. Although the study only included healthy individuals, the researchers hope to see similar results in people with chronic pain, which is the next step they are eager to pursue.

“The brain is extremely powerful, and we are still working to understand how it can be used for pain management by studying the brain,” Dr. Zidan said in a news release. He emphasized the potential benefits of mindfulness meditation for pain management and explained that it is a low-cost, drug-free approach that can be practiced anywhere.

“Millions of people struggle with chronic pain every day, and they can do more than we previously realized to reduce their pain and improve their quality of life,” Zidane said. With further research, mindfulness meditation may become a valuable tool in clinical settings, offering a non-pharmaceutical way to relieve chronic pain.

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