Here’s more great news! Meditation techniques to relieve IBS not only helps with the symptoms of chronic pain, overwhelming fatigue, and emotional distress – the benefits of meditation last for months and years.
The Pain Of IBS Is Overwhelming
Always check with your doctor before using meditation techniques for stomach pain
“In my opinion, the most significant feature of IBS is that the pain and symptoms can be all-consuming,” said Dr. Harris, associate professor, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn. “Mindfulness therapy provides a way to break the cycle. It’s not ‘the answer,’ but it seems like a promising adjunctive therapy that can really benefit IBS patients without side effects.”
Meditation Techniques To Relieve IBS
Mindfulness meditation is as much as four times more effective than group support in relieving the severity of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptoms, according to research presented at the 2011 Digestive Disease Week meeting (abstract 219). Patients with IBS who participated in eight weekly meditation sessions and meditated daily at home experienced residual symptom relief three months after ending treatment.
Lucinda A. Harris, MD, who was not involved in the study, said the research confirms that modalities like mindfulness need to be integrated into a holistic approach to treating IBS, which also includes diet, exercise and sleep modification, in addition to symptom-oriented pharmacotherapy.
The study’s primary investigator Susan Gaylord, PhD, director of the Program on Integrative Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described mindfulness meditation as a behavioral technique that teaches patients to “attend to present-moment experience and nonjudgmental awareness of sensations and emotions, as well as to let go of fixations on thoughts of past and future.” A growing body of evidence shows the approach reduces symptom severity and improves the quality of life in patients with a spectrum of conditions and diseases, ranging from fibromyalgia to anxiety.
To investigate the therapy’s efficacy, Dr. Gaylord and colleagues randomly assigned 34 women with IBS to participate in eight weekly sessions of a mindfulness program and another 32 women with IBS to attend eight weekly support groups. Patients were a mean age of 43 years. The researchers measured the severity of IBS symptoms using the IBS Severity Scale (IBS-SS), the IBS Quality of Life (IBS-QOL) scale, the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 (BSI-18) and the Visceral Sensitivity Index (VSI) prior to and following treatment as well as three months after the study ended.
Dr. Gaylord noted that mindfulness subjects were able to continue an individual home-based practice following their intervention, while the same was not true for support group attendees. She said her team did not record the number of subjects who continued practicing the mindfulness technique after formal treatment ended and that further research needs to determine whether continuing mindfulness practice independently may provide residual benefits.
Despite this unknown, Dr. Gaylord believes her study provides enough evidence to justify recommending mindfulness meditation as a treatment option for IBS patients.
“Mindfulness-based stress management programs are widely accessible through medical and health institutions in the United States, and physicians can safely refer their patients to these programs,” Dr. Gaylord concluded. Original here
This is wonderful news for people suffering from the chronic pain and fatigue of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Mindfulness meditation techniques have already proven to be more that four times more powerful than morphine in relieving pain.
Now we have clinical proof that it’s also effective with IBS.
Learning meditation techniques to relieve IBS really only takes a few hours of instruction, either in person, or via DVD’s or downloaded meditation programs to relieve chronic pain.
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