From nurse.com: Meditation — long considered by many the province of Buddhists and New Age gurus — is gaining new respect among neurologists, psychiatrists and others who study the brain. An increasing volume of scientific study is not only showing that meditation helps reduce stress, but is offering some physiological clues about why it might be beneficial to the body and brain.
Meditation has been studied for 20 years, but in the past five to 10 years the focus of that research has gone beyond the idea that meditation makes a person feel better to scientific measurement of physiological changes, says Susan Bauer-Wu, RN, PhD, FAAN, a cancer researcher and associate professor of nursing at Emory University in Atlanta.
Recent studies of mindfulness meditation have shown evidence it may bolster the immune system and slow the progression of disease in patients with HIV/AIDS, improve blood pressure and reduce psychological distress in young adults, improve the emotional well-being and mental health of breast cancer patients, and be as effective as medications in treating insomnia.
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