Is mindfulness meditation a placebo?

Pain is a complex and multifaceted experience, determined by a variety of factors beyond the mere physical sensation, such as a person’s mindset and expectations about pain. The placebo effect, the tendency for a person’s symptoms to improve in response to an ineffective treatment, is a well-known example of how expectations can significantly alter a person’s perception of pain.

Mindfulness meditation, which has been used for centuries in various cultures to treat pain, has long been suspected of triggering the placebo effect. A new study has sought to clarify this question by closely observing brain activity.

The study was carried out by a team comprising, among others, Gabriel Riegner and Fadel Zeidan, specialists in anesthesiology at the University of California in San Diego, United States.

The study included 115 participants, and consisted of two separate clinical trials in which healthy participants were randomly assigned to groups to receive one of four interventions. One group received a guided mindfulness meditation. Another received a sham mindfulness meditation that consisted only of deep breathing. Another received a placebo cream (Vaseline) that was presented to participants as a pain-relieving cream. The fourth group received no pain-relieving intervention, real or sham, but simply listened to an audiobook.

The researchers applied a very painful but harmless thermal stimulus to the back of one leg of each person and scanned the participants’ brains before and after the interventions.

In the study, advanced brain scanning techniques based on artificial intelligence were used to compare the pain-reducing effects of mindfulness meditation, placebo cream, sham mindfulness meditation, and listening to the audiobook.

Although both placebo cream and sham mindfulness meditation reduced pain, the researchers found that true mindfulness meditation was significantly more effective at reducing pain compared to placebo cream, sham mindfulness meditation, and listening to the audiobook.

These brain scans show different neural signatures associated with pain response: NAPS (left) is associated with the emotional experience of pain, SIIPS-1 (center) is related to our expectations of pain and other psychosocial factors, and NPS (right) is associated with pain intensity. The study authors found that mindfulness meditation can modulate NAPS and NPS, but not SIIPS-1, unlike placebos. This shows that mindfulness-based pain relief involves parts of the brain that are not the same as placebos. (Images: UC San Diego Health Sciences)

Analysis of brain scans has revealed that the mindfulness meditation technique activates different brain mechanisms to reduce pain compared to those activated by the placebo effect.

The study is titled “Mindfulness meditation and placebo modulate distinct multivariate neural signatures to reduce pain.” It was published in the academic journal Biological Psychiatry. (Source: NCYT by Amazings)