The practice involves “being present” with your thoughts and feelings, usually using breathing techniques. It is said to help people feel less distressed when dealing with stressful emotional situations, but now scientists say they have shown for the first time that it can also treat physical pain. They put about 30 healthy Americans through an eight-week mindfulness course and then compared them to a control group. Participants underwent brain scans before and after the course while their limbs were exposed to heat to demonstrate a pain response. Those who practiced mindfulness showed less activity in the areas of the brain responsible for pain compared to the control group. A separate experiment on long-term mindfulness followers showed that they had physical changes in their brains that affected their perception of pain. The researchers claim that the results show that mindfulness could be used instead of opioids or other painkillers for people with chronic pain. Mindfulness practice is on the rise, particularly in the US, with some studies estimating that 5.7 million Americans have tried it at least once. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin discovered that mindfulness could be used as a form of pain management (stock image) Several celebrities have championed mindfulness, including Harry Potter star Emma Watson (pictured here in October last year) Hollywood star and UNHCR envoy Angelina Jolie is also a proponent of the technique (pictured here in Ukraine in April) Talk show host Oprah Winfrey also spoke about her belief that mindfulness helps people be present for those they love Tennis professional Novak Djokovic said he used mindfulness as part of his mental training as an athlete In the study, University of Wisconsin researchers put three groups of Americans through an eight-week stress reduction course. Drug use for pain management has come under scrutiny due to the rise of opioid addiction in the US. There are also fears of a similar growing crisis in the UK, with opioid hospitalizations soaring over the past decade as more Brits turn to painkillers while on NHS waiting lists for operations such as hip or knee replacements.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a popular form of meditation in which you focus on being acutely aware of what you are feeling and feeling in the moment. The practice includes breathing techniques, guided imagery and other practices to relax the body and mind and help reduce stress. It is often touted as a universal tool for boosting mental well-being by reducing stress, anxiety and depression. Mindfulness has become popular in recent years as a way to improve mental and physical well-being. Celebrities who support it include Emma Watson, Davina McCall, Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey. Mindfulness is a form of guided meditation where people pay attention to the present moment and their immediate thoughts and feelings. It generally involves breathing techniques, guided imagery, and other practices to relax the body and mind and help reduce stress. Over time, the technique is said to improve mental well-being by helping people become more aware of the present moment, helping them enjoy the world around them and better understand themselves. In the latter study, 28 healthy adults underwent a two-month mindfulness course that included a weekly two-and-a-half-hour group class, a daily retreat, and 45 minutes of home mindfulness per day. It incorporates simple yoga, mindfulness meditation and body scanning, a technique where a person pays attention to their body and senses in a gradual sequence from head to toe. Eighty-seven people were used as a control group and just went about their normal lives. In the study, scientists took images of participants’ brains and looked for two parts of the organ that are normally activated in response to pain. The researchers carefully applied heat to the participants’ forearm, slowly increasing the temperature to mimic the pain response. Publishing their findings in The American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers found that people who took the mindfulness course had less activity in one of the pain response areas of their brains. Lead author Dr Joseph Wielgosz, a psychologist in Wisconsin, said the results showed the direct way in which mindfulness helped people reduce their perception of pain. “Our finding supports the idea that for young exercisers, mindfulness training directly affects how sensory signals from the body are converted into a brain response,” he said. The researchers also looked at the brains of “seasoned” mindfulness practitioners, those who take intensive mediation retreats. Dr Wielgosz said these scans showed that mindfulness training had indeed changed the areas of the brain that modulate how we experience pain. “Just as an experienced athlete plays a sport differently than a novice, experienced mindfulness practitioners seem to use their mental ‘muscles’ differently in response to pain than first-time meditators,” he said. Opioid hospitalizations in England (the black line) have risen to just over 16,000 cases in 2018 from around 10,000 in 2008, an increase of around 50 per cent in a decade, this is mainly due to an increase in the number of opioid poisonings considered more serious (the dashed blue line) from opioid abuse (the green dashed line) In the US, an estimated one-fifth of Americans live with some form of chronic pain.

How to be careful

Experts give five tips for getting a person into a state of mindfulness First, focus on breathing. A person should recognize when they are inhaling and exhaling and “home” in their breath Then a person should sharpen and make sure to concentrate on the pulse of his breath The next step is to increase your awareness from your breath to your body as a whole and to know where the tension is within yourself. Fourth, a person must release tension and enter a greater state of relaxation Once a person enters a state of mindfulness, it is recommended that they practice “walking meditation,” where they continue to be mindful while moving and enjoy every movement their body makes. Source: Mindful.org America is still living with the consequences of the opioid epidemic that began in the early 2000s. Overdose deaths are now the leading cause of death among young Americans—killing more in one year than HIV, gun violence or car accidents ever did annually. In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control revealed that nearly 71,000 Americans died from drug overdoses. That’s up from about 59,000 just three years ago, in 2016, and more than double the death rate from a decade ago. It means drug overdose is currently the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. In Britain, the National Institute for Care Excellence estimates that 28 million, around four in 10 Britons, live with some form of chronic pain. One of the most common causes of chronic pain in the UK is arthritis, a condition that causes pain and swelling in people’s joints, more common in older people. Doctors are looking for alternative ways to manage pain due to growing concerns about opioid use in both the UK and the US. A study, published in February, found that hospitalizations for opioid overdoses in Britain have increased by 50 percent in a decade. The researchers, from the London School of Economics, pointed out that there was a sixfold increase in patients with multiple underlying health conditions requiring urgent care for opioid use, suggesting they may have been misusing them as part of pain management.

HOW DID AMERICA FALL WITH OPIOIDS AND IS THE SAME HAPPENING TO BRITAIN?

New research has shown that hospital admissions for opioids have risen by 50 per cent in the past decade in England, fueling fears that the UK could face a similar opioid crisis to the one in the US that has devastated thousands of families.
In the early 2000s, the FDA and CDC began to notice a steady increase in opioid addiction and overdose cases. In 2013, they issued guidelines to curb addiction. However, that same year—now considered the year of the painkiller epidemic—a CDC report revealed an unprecedented increase in opioid addiction rates. Overdose deaths are now the leading cause of death among young Americans—killing more in one year than HIV, gun violence or car accidents ever did annually. In 2019, the CDC revealed that nearly 71,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. That’s up from about 59,000 just three years ago, in 2016, and more than double the death rate from a decade ago. It means drug overdose is currently the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. The data reveal the grim state of America’s opioid addiction crisis fueled by deadly manufactured drugs like fentanyl.