14 DAY TRIAL // Meditation may represent a low-cost solution to the wide array of health problems that are caused by stress. The phenomenon causes a lot of damage both in our minds and in our bodies, and counteracting it with meditation provides a cheap and effective method of keeping the side-effects in check.
Improving national healthcare costs has become a major objective in all developed countries, given the enormous amounts of money being circulated while patients get only sparse attention and care.
The most effective method of reducing costs is to eliminate the root of the problem, and constant stress is one of the main reasons why people become more prone to developing medical disorders in the first place. The modern world could be said to revolve around the effects of stress.
Meditation could help by making people tougher, and more capable of resisting persistent stress, says the sole author of the study, independent researcher Robert E. Herron, PhD. He holds an appointment as the director of the Center for Health Systems Analysis.
In the experiments he conducted, people who practiced a technique called Transcendental Meditation (TM) for five years in a row displayed a 28 percent reduction in their health care costs. The high sums of money they paid for treatments is what got them into the study in the first place.
Details of the new study appear in the September/October 2011 issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion. An abstract of the research paper is available on the US National Library of Medicine / National Institutes of Health website PubMed.
Statistics are very worrying for the United States as far as medical costs go. Only 10 percent of the population – the highest-spending bit – cover more than 70 percent of total annual expenditures the healthcare system registers.
The highest medical expenses are caused by chronic diseases, and the new study demonstrates that it is possible to reduce these costs by using TM. “This article has major policy significance for saving Medicare and Medicaid without cutting benefits or raising taxes,” Herron explains.
“Almost no intervention for cost containment has decreased medical expenditures by 28 percent over five years from a baseline. Now, it may be possible to rescue Medicare and Medicaid by adding coverage for learning the Transcendental Meditation technique,” he adds.
An unrelated, 11-year, cross-sectional study conducted a while back in the state of Iowa demonstrated that TM practitioners above the age of 45 had 88 percent fewer hospital days, and 60 percent lower medical expenditure levels, than peers matched for age, social status and income, PsychCentral reports.