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The national discussion forum and community for UK Healthcare Professionals with an interest in acute, chronic, or palliative Pain Management.
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This page was last updated: November 16, 2007
Mindfulness in Medicine
Gary Hennessey
Breathworks is a Community Interest Company (non-profit making)
whose aim is to relieve human suffering. We do this by teaching
mindfulness, both to people suffering from persistent pain and/or
other long-term health conditions (our Pain Management Programme)
and also to people suffering from stress and related symptoms
(our Living Well Programme).
Our work is part of a movement of mindfulness-based work in medicine
started by Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues, who initiated the
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme thirty years ago
at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre. Kabat-Zinn didn’t inv
nt mindfulness though, it comes from the 2,500 year old Buddhist tradition
and is a central aspect of the mind-training that the Buddha taught.
Mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness, cultivated by paying
attention to whatever is presently occurring, both externally and internally.
Although it comes from the Buddhist tradition mindfulness can be
practiced by anyone, regardless of their religious (or non-religious) beliefs.
The MBSR programme was developed specifically for those people who came to the Medical Centre with chronic health conditions, conditions for which their doctors and other specialists could find no cure. It was developed as a way of helping people to work with their condition so that they could live fulfilling lives even when suffering with pain or other unpleasant sensations. Kabat-Zinn coined the term participatory medicine for this work because the participants of the programme have to work to improve their own health and well-being. In his book Full Catastrophe Living he writes “The Stress Clinic is not a rescue service in which people are passive recipients of support and therapeutic advice. Rather it is a vehicle for active learning, in which people can build on the strengths that they already have and come to do something for themselves…” In the thirty years since its inception over 16,000 people have attended the Programme in Massachusetts and there are now many MBSR Programmes running, not only in America but in other parts of the world too.
We in the UK have been rather slow in taking up mindfulness in medicine, although it is now becoming very well known amongst health professionals and many are beginning to train in mindfulness. This is largely thanks to the work of three clinical psychologists, Mark Williams, John Teasdale and Zinden Segal, who in the early 1990s were looking at ways to prevent relapse in people prone to depression. Their expertise was in cognitive therapy but their explorations took them to the work of Kabat-Zinn. In collaboration with him they developed a new Programme to prevent depression relapse, which they called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).
We at Breathworks can also take some of the credit for this burgeoning interest in mindfulness amongst health professionals. Our Mindfulness Based Pain Management Programme (MBPM) has been running for almost six years now and we have recently been the subject of a lot of interest from the health professions, especially from those who work in Pain Management Units in hospitals across the UK. This year we have given presentations on our work at the British Pain Society’s Annual Scientific Meeting, the Mindfulness in Medicine conference at the University of Bangor and the Annual Congress of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists. We have also run a number of training events for health professionals interested in using mindfulness in their work. Incidentally, health professionals aren’t the only people we train. Anyone who has had a meditation practice for at least one year can train with us.
Coming from a scientific background Kabat-Zinn was keen from the outset to find evidence showing that the MBSR programme was effective and he initiated and collaborated in many research projects. Consequently there have been numerous research papers published showing the efficacy of mindfulness for a wide range of conditions. We also have evidence for the efficacy of our own Pain Management Programme. The founder of the Programme, Vidyamala Burch, from day one of the first ever MBPM course, asked participants to complete validated health questionnaires at the beginning and end of the course, and we have been doing that ever since. We now have five years worth of data and we recently asked a clinical psychologist to analyse the results for us. Happily the results were overwhelmingly positive, showing significant statistical evidence of clinical improvement across all scales, physical, mental and emotional, and we are now receiving invitations from universities and hospitals to collaborate on various research projects.
Gary Hennessey.
References: Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Publisher – Delta Books.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression. Segal, Williams & Teasdale. Publisher – Guilford.
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