Western medicine changed its mind about meditation in 2007.
Up until then, meditation was on the blacklist as one of the ‘unproven’ therapies due to lack of supporting evidence and credibility. In other words, a highly effective therapy that had been widely practised for thousands of years in Asia was disrespected and dismissed. Even though a minority of psychologists were open to it, the official position was righteously denialist, closed-minded, and openly hostile.
Why was there an absence of evidence? Mostly this was because Western medicine’s chosen path for the psychiatric sciences had created a lucrative industry. Billions of dollars were invested annually into pharmaceuticals and billions more being made from them. Pharmaceutical companies were using selective evidence to squeeze competitors out and dominate the market. Meditation didn’t attract sufficient research funding and therefore the evidence could not be obtained.
By the turn of the century, Western psychological science was hundreds of years behind the Eastern mystics on essential components of human psychology. Important components of human consciousness including sensory skills, the ability to self-calm and controlled breathing were absent from the picture. Western science was missing the boat and will take a long time to catch-up.
To put it simply, the primitive approach to stress in the West was to prescribe Valium and perhaps some talk therapy. If someone was depressed, they’d be prescribed Prozac and perhaps receive some cognitive behaviour therapy.
That was until Professor Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin teamed up with the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behaviour and enlisted the help of the Dalai Lama to provide a group of Tibetan monks. The brains of the meditating monks were tested inside a MRI machine and a comparative group of novices were also tested in the same conditions.
The results shook-up Western science.
Finally, good evidence was unearthed to reveal the therapeutic power of meditation.
‘Regions of the brain that are intimately involved in the control and regulation of attention, such as the prefrontal cortex, were more activated in the long-term practitioners,’ said Richard Davidson, and the monks were able to concentrate much better than the novices.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Once evidence had emerged, the medical science community completely changed its approach to meditation. Meditation was always going to be a hard sell to America’s Christian community which was rigidly averse to practising Eastern wellness methods for fear of being un-Christian. It was decided that the way to expand the practice to a wider audience was to rebrand meditation and call it ‘mindfulness’.
So, in a short time mainstream science shifted from ridiculing meditation, to embracing it and then to owning it.
A consequence of this intransigence to Eastern medicine is that Western science has not been exploring meditation for long enough to have comprehensive knowledge about the human mind. There is so much more for them to discover. The next few decades will be intriguing.
