Despite the scientific establishment’s equivocal conclusions about the efficacy of meditation, positive perceptions are evident among the Western lay population because of the increasing popularity of the philosophy, metaphysics and folklore associated with the ancient and traditional Indian ideas of meditation1.
So it is important to develop an understanding of meditation, in the words of Taylor [...]
The Western scientific and health community of scientists and clinicians has generated in excess of 3,000 peer-reviewed articles on or referring to meditation (as featured in the major bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE and PsycINFO).
The maximum yearly output was in 2000–2001 when 12 RCTs were reported in MEDLINE. In the same time period 106 RCTs [...]
First - there is insufficient evidence to support the idea that meditation, as conceived and tested by scientific researchers in the West, is any more effective than simple relaxation or rest.
Second - the use of high face-validity control groups is critical in meditation research because of the need to exclude the important confounding effects of non-specific factors [...]
The effects of meditation on anxiety and stress are comparable to effect sizes described in conventional meta-analyses of psychotherapy field studies73.
For example Andrews’ review of psychotherapy for neurotic patients reported a mean effect size of 0.74 for verbal psychotherapy and 0.97 for behavioural psychotherapy vis-a-vis a mean effect size of 0.55 for placebo56.
It should be [...]
Unlike modern Western therapeutic thinking however, meditation was not originally designed to be used as a course of treatment so much as to be part of an ongoing lifestyle thus implying that the benefits of meditation are likely to persist in the follow-up phase only so long as the person chooses to meditate regularly.
Meditation instructional [...]
Sham meditation procedures necessarily involve deception of participants and the ethicality of this in clinical trials is open to dispute. Further, this kind of strategy can be logistically challenging and there is always a risk that the deception might be uncovered, thereby immediately invalidating the entire study.
The fact that some techniques elicit detectable effects when [...]
It may not be practically possible to devise and implement an ideal control method for meditation trials, nevertheless it is important to select a strategy that approximates that ideal.
The bare minimum criteria for a control process in meditation research should therefore be:
• First, high face validity as a therapeutic/stress management intervention in its own right. It [...]
Examining the studies in the review ”Does Meditation Have a Specific Effect? A Systematic Experimental Evaluation of a Mental silence Orientated Definition”, control methods were presumptively categorized according to their face-validity into low, moderate or high face validity categories.
The low face-validity controls used strategies that were:
Passive and unstructured: Participants were involved in minimal or no activity [...]
Control methods in meditation trials can be positioned on a spectrum based on their varying ability to elicit non-specific effects. At the low face validity end are those that are mostly passive and implausible (such as “waiting list”) and therefore unlikely to control for non-specific factors, while at the other extreme are those that are [...]
It seems obvious that the non-specific effect of any intervention is closely related to its credibility and plausibility as a therapeutic intervention i.e. its “face validity”.
Now, some of the effects associated with meditation must be non-specific, i.e. comprising a mixture of placebo, therapeutic contact, spontaneous improvement, and so on, whereas some, hopefully, are specific to [...]