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Beth Israel Medical Center is among New York City's pre-eminent hospitals, a bastion of the traditional healing arts. But every Thursday at lunchtime, in the hospital's alternative-healing facility, a Buddhist monk leads a 25-minute meditation session for patients and staff.
“Let your thoughts wander in and out; let the noise wander in and out,” the monk says, instructing a small group in the hospital's Continuum Center for Health and Healing to focus on their breathing as they sit with their eyes closed at a long table.
Meditation is one of several alternative-healing activities the center offers. Patients also have chanted to invoke spirits, guided by a Native American physician, and they can participate in reiki, which adherents describe as a form of “energy healing.”
As more hospitals open alternative-healing centers, meditation and prayer are taking their place among such standard complementary therapies as aromatherapy, homeopathy and massage, according to Woodson Merrell, the center's director. “It's a very powerful way for people to help themselves,” says Merrell, an internist. When it comes to his own patients, he most often recommends meditation, but he suggests prayer if the patient is religious.
“In a sense, we're going back to old-time medical practice, when physicians were interested in the whole person,” Merrell observes, adding that medicine today is “too compartmentalized” into specific areas like diabetes or high blood pressure, and doctors in busy HMOs (health maintenance organizations) do not have time to ask if there is an emotional component to a patient's disease.
Dr. Herbert Benson conducted the first scientific studies of the benefits of meditation 30 years ago. (Mind/Body Medical Institute)
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Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Chestnut Hill, Mass., conducted the first scientific studies of the benefits of meditation 30 years ago and published his findings in The Relaxation Response. The 1975 book taught readers how to reduce stress using meditative techniques similar to those espoused by devotees of Transcendental Meditation — meditative techniques introduced to the Western world by a Hindu guru in India named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Benson argued that non-devotees could gain similar health benefits by merely sitting quietly with eyes closed for 15-20 minutes twice a day while silently repeating a word, sound or movement and passively ignoring thoughts, much as the Buddhist monk directs patients to ignore the noise around them and return to the rhythm of their breathing.
“The essence of the relaxation response is to break the train of everyday thought,” abolishing stressful thoughts, explains Benson, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University.
Benson says the relaxation response is the opposite of the “fight or flight” response triggered by stress, which releases adrenaline and noradrenaline hormones that increase metabolism, blood pressure and heart rate. By contrast, his studies show, those who meditate or use other methods like prayer to evoke the relaxation response experience a decrease in all these physiological processes — potentially reducing the incidence of heart attacks, high blood pressure, hot flashes, infertility or premenstrual syndrome.
The technique is not new, he says. “For millennia, people have been carrying out these techniques within a religious context,” citing such repetitive practices as the mantra used in Hinduism, the repeated bowing in davenning (a Jewish form of praying), saying the Catholic rosary and praying five times a day by Muslims.
That may explain why Shoshana Silverman Belisle, a psychotherapist at the center, finds the Thursday meditation sessions so refreshing. “It's a clean break — like an eraser that wipes away all the nonsense,” she says. “It helps to center myself.”
Benson has trained thousands of doctors in the relaxation technique, and many now teach it to their patients. Yoga and tai chi — as well as knitting and jogging — can produce the same effect, he says. According to Benson, the relaxation technique is an essential part of medicine because neither drugs nor surgery can treat stress-related disorders effectively.
However, not everyone is convinced that meditation can necessarily fight disease. “It's good marketing,” according to Richard P. Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. “There's no doubt the relaxation response has an impact on the autonomic nervous system, but there's a question whether that translates into a health benefit or whether it's just ephemeral.”
Benson is also fascinated by a meditation technique he saw practiced by Buddhist monks in India who visualize an internal fire to burn away the defilements of everyday thinking. While meditating, Benson says, the monks generated so much body heat that they were able to put icy, wet sheets on their naked bodies in freezing winter conditions for more than an hour, and the sheets began to steam.
“You and I would go into uncontrollable shivering and die” under such conditions, Benson says. “These studies show the mind-body power that we have to better understand.”
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