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  • Meditation and Pain management

    According to a new study, mindfulness meditation exhibited even stronger physical pain reductions than morphine, says the study’s lead investigator
    Open any magazine and you’ll find that mindfulness has gone mainstream. You’ll also notice there are studies that purport to show meditation’s benefits on just about everything, from kids’ math scores and migraine length to HIV management and bouncing back after a crisis. Now, an elaborate new forthcoming study looks at how the brains of meditators respond to pain, to be published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
    f-202.jpgDr. Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, has studied mindfulness for 15 years and has observed improved health outcomes as a result. “But what if this is all just a placebo?” he wondered. “What if people are reporting improvements in health and reductions in pain just because of meditation’s reputation as a health-promoting practice?” He wanted to find out, so he designed a trials that included a placebo group.
    Zeidan recruited 75 healthy, pain-free people and scanned their brains using an MRI while they experienced painful heat with a 120-degree thermal probe. Then, the researchers sorted them into four groups and gave them four days of training. Everyone thought they were getting the real intervention, but most of them were getting a sham treatment.
    “I want to be restrained about the efficacy of mindfulness, and the way to be restrained about it is by making it harder and harder to demonstrate its effectiveness,” Zeidan says.
    First, there was a placebo cream group that participants were told reduces pain over time, Zeidan says (it was really just petroleum jelly). For four days, they rubbed it on the back of their leg and tested it against that painfully hot thermal probe. Little did they know, the researchers cranked down the heat each day; the participants thought the cream was working.
    Another group was taught a kind of fake mindfulness meditation—they were told to breathe deeply for 20 minutes but were given no instructions on how to do it mindfully. The control group was subjected to 20 minutes of a very boring book on tape: The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.996972_621934824532791_1132991476_n
    For the real intervention, people sat for 20 minutes with straight posture, closed their eyes and listened to specific instructions about where to focus one’s attention and how to let thoughts and emotions pass without judgment. “Our subjects are taught to focus on the changing sensations of breath and to follow the breath with the mind’s eye as it goes down the chest and abdomen,” Zeidan says.
    After four days, everyone re-entered the MRI machine and endured the same pain from the 120-degree probe. They were told to use their training—breathing deeply, mindfully meditating or the cream. They used a lever to indicate the physical intensity and emotional unpleasantness of the pain.
    They found that people in all of the groups had greater pain reductions than the control group. The placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by an average of 11% and emotional unpleasantness of pain by 13%. For the sham mindfulness group, those numbers were 9% and 24% respectively. But mindfulness meditation outperformed them all. In this group, pain intensity was cut by 27% and emotional pain reduced by 44%.
    That shocked Zeidan. Past research has indicated that the opioid morphine reduces physical pain by 22%—and mindfulness had surpassed even that. But the MRI results, which showed how pain was registering in their brains, surprised him even more. People who had practiced mindfulness meditation seemed to be using different brain regions than the other groups to reduce pain.
    “There was something more active, we believe, going on with the genuine mindfulness meditation group,” Zeidan says. This group had increased activation in higher-order brain regions associated with attention control and enhanced cognitive control, he says, while exhibiting a deactivation of the thalamus—a structure that acts as the gatekeeper for pain to enter the brain, he explains. “We haven’t seen that with any other technique before.”create
    It’s an important preliminary study, Zeidan says, but exactly who will benefit from meditation’s impact on pain is still unknown. “We’re now at the stage, at least in my lab, where we have enough evidence that meditation reduces pain and it does it in a really unique fashion, different from any other technique we’ve seen,” he says.
    And as for the questions left unanswered? “We don’t have the studies yet,” he says, “but we’re getting there.”
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  • A Child’s View of Sensory Processing

     

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  • art can

    “Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.”  Angela Y. Davis
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  • dreams

    “Don’t look for your dreams to come true; look to become true to your dreams.” Michael Beckwith

     

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  • 3 Dietary Interventions that Can Help Children with ADHD

    Are dietary inter­ven­tions effec­tive for treat­ing ADHD? For many par­ents and pro­fes­sion­als, try­ing to parse through the dif­fer­ent claims about the impact of diet on ADHD has been chal­leng­ing and confusing. At this point, sub­stan­tial research on how dietary inter­ven­tions impact ADHD has accu­mu­lated and sev­eral meta-analyses of this work have been pub­lished. Recently, a review of sev­eral meta-analyses of dietary inter­ven­tions for ADHD was pub­lished [Research review: The role of diet in the treat­ment of attention-deficit/hyper­ac­tiv­ity dis­or­der — an appraisal of the evi­dence on effi­cacy and rec­om­men­da­tions on the design of future stud­ies]. In this paper, the authors sum­ma­rize find­ings across 6 dif­fer­ent meta-analyses of the impact of diet on ADHD to pro­vide a high level sum­mary of the best avail­able evi­dence to date.

    Types of dietary interventions

    Three types of dietary interventions were reviewed — Restricted Elimination Diets (RED), Artificial food coloring exclusion (AFCE), and supplementation with free fatty acids (SFFA). Although other types of supplements beyond free fatty acids have been investigated, the authors felt there was not sufficient research on any sin­gle approach to include in their summary.

    1. Restricted elimination diets (RED) — There are 2 different approaches to implementing this diet. In one approach, the child is placed on an extremely restricted diet, e.g., rice, turkey, a range of veg­eta­bles (let­tuce, car­rots, cau­li­flower, cab­bage, beets), pears and water; this is some­times referred to as the Few Food Diet. When a reduc­tion in ADHD behav­iors results — this would gen­er­ally occur within 2–3 weeks if the diet is going to have a pos­i­tive effect — new foods can be added back one at a time to see if they are well-tolerated or lead to an increase in prob­lem behav­iors. Alter­na­tively, par­tic­u­lar foods that are sus­pected to exac­er­bate a child’s symp­toms may be removed one at a time to see if the child’s behav­ior improves.

    2. Arti­fi­cial food col­or­ing exclu­sion (AFCE)- As the title indi­cates, this involves efforts to remove all arti­fi­cial food col­or­ings from a child’s diet, e.g.,Yellow #6, Yel­low #5, Sodium Ben­zoate, Blue #2, etc., and observ­ing whether this is asso­ci­ated with a reduc­tion in ADHD behav­iors. Care­fully con­ducted tri­als have demon­strated that AFC’s – in amounts chil­dren could typ­i­cally con­sume – can increase ADHD symp­toms in many children.

    3. Essen­tial fatty acid sup­ple­men­ta­tion — Cer­tain fatty acids, e.g., Omega 3 and Omega 6, pro­mote neural func­tion­ing. These fatty acids are called essen­tial because they are not syn­the­sized in the body and must be ingested. Chil­dren with ADHD may have lower lev­els of essen­tial fatty acids rel­a­tive to peers and sev­eral stud­ies have demon­strated a link between low lev­els of EFAs and the sever­ity of ADHD symp­toms. Stud­ies inves­ti­gat­ing the ben­e­fits of fatty acid sup­ple­men­ta­tion for youth with ADHD raise fatty acid lev­els by admin­is­ter­ing cap­sules con­tain­ing the fatty acids or sometimes by introducing diets rich in fish products.

    See more at: http://www.creativitypost.com/science/3_dietary_interventions_that_can_help_children_with_adhd_especially_when_pr

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  • When Meds Fail: A Case for Music Therapy: Tim Ringgold at TEDxYouth@BommerCanyon

     

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  • Creative Play for Kids Art and Drama Therapy for Children – Coping with Trauma

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  • body

    Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live. ~Jim Rohn
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  • Coloring Page Mandala

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  • How to Build Your Creative Confidence | David Kelley | TED Talks

     

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