 The role of mindfulness in medicine: prevent, treat and heal
Hippocrates, under the vow of whom medicine is practiced, said that the job of physicians also implied helping patients to find within themselves the power to heal.
During the last decades, physicians found a little easier to perform this role due to the use of mindfulness in medicine. Mindfulness is a meditation practice originating from Buddhism, which calls for on purpose constant awareness of the current experiences in a non-judgmental manner.
Mindfulness started to be used in medicine as a palliative method in the early 80’s, after Jon Kabbat-Zin, a microbiologist from the University of Massachusetts, had developed the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction program (MBSR). This is an eight-weeks sessions program combining body-scanning, meditation and yoga, with the original aim of helping alleviate the suffering of patients with chronic illnesses and disorders caused by stress. In time, the interest in the use of mindfulness in medicine has constantly grown thanks to its proven efficiency in preventing or reducing symptoms of very different kind of disorders and illnesses. Cancer, AIDS, psoriasis, diabetes, fibromyalgia, sleep and eating disorders, addictions, chronic anxiety, depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are just a few of the conditions that mindfulness practice helped improving, according to studies conducted so far. Each year, the role of mindfulness in medicine is reinforced by new research results and new medical centers developing therapies inspired by MBSR.
Jon Kabbat-Zin’s MBSR program and all the other therapies derived from it are based on the idea that our overall health depends on the balance between our body and our mind and that stress is the main destructor of this balance. Mindfulness’s utility in medicine consists in the power to reestablish this balance. Stress usually comes from engaging all our inner resources in fighting and suppressing all the feelings related to something that does not fit our idea of normality, build on our past experiences or on our fantasies of what future looks like. When it becomes constant, stress ruminates our mental and physical health, makes existing diseases grow worse and creates favorable conditions for new ones. Through mindfulness, people learn to deal with stress, by focusing only on the actual moment and developing stillness and acceptance of their current experiences.
Because it attacks the main generator of several illnesses, the role of mindfulness in medicine should be rather preventive than alleviating, as it is the case now. During an interview, Jon Kabbat-Zin said that we couldn’t talk about a health care system, but about a disease care system. Indeed, mindfulness is often recommended in medicine as a support treatment, in advanced stages when suffering is very difficult to bear or when drugs-based treatment does not show results anymore. Its preventing role is usually overlooked. Besides, mindfulness’s utility in medicine does not refer only to the patients, but also to the doctors. Think about how much the medical act would improve if each time a doctor was with a patient, his entire attention would be on that patient? For sure there would be fewer errors, less malpractice, more pro-activity. In other words, the full healing power of mindfulness in medicine would be enhanced if mindfulness was embraced on both sides: patients and doctors.
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