神奇的医嘱：冥想

Doctor's Orders:

20 Minutes Of Meditation Twice A Day

神奇的医嘱：

冥想

At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, doctor's orders can include an unlikely prescription:

meditation.

Integrative medicine programs including meditation are increasingly showing up at hospitals and clinics across the country. Recent research has found that meditation can lower blood pressure and help patients with chronic illness cope with pain and depression. In a study published last year,meditation sharply reduced the risk of heart attack or stroke among a group of African-Americans with heart disease.

At Beth Israel Deaconess, meditation and other mind-body therapies are slowly being worked into the primary-care setting. The program began offering some services over the past six months and hopes eventually to have group meditation classes, said Dr. Nerurkar.

Dr. Briggs said the agency is funding a number of studies looking at meditation and breathing techniques and their effect on numerous conditions, including hot flashes that occur during menopause. If meditation is found to be beneficial, it could help women avoid using hormone treatments, which can have detrimental side effects, she said.

Martha O'Boyle, a 51-year-old in Fremont, Calif., has suffered from chronic pain in her arms,chest and elsewhere since suffering from a heart attack two years ago.

'Here's a cardiologist telling me to go and meditate,' said Ms. O'Boyle. 'I'm thinking, does shethink I'm crazy?'

Ms. O'Boyle began taking meditation classes at Stanford Hospital & Clinics in 2011. The eight-week class consisted of once-a-week sessions lasting two to three

hours. 'Once I started the class I saw the benefits of it,' she said. Now, Ms. O'Boyle meditates every day for 20 to 45 minutes. 'The pain is not gone, but it helps me cope with it,' she said.

Murali Doraiswamy, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham,N.C., says it isn't clearly understood how meditation works on the body. Some forms of meditation have been found to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which stimulates the body's relaxation response, improves blood supply, slows down heart rate and breathing and increases digestive activity, he said. It also slows down the release of stress hormones, such as cortisol.

Thousands of studies have been published that look at meditation, Dr. Doraiswamy said. Of these,about 500 have been clinical trials testing meditation for various ailments, but only about 40 trials have been long-term studies. It isn't known whether there is an optimal amount of time for meditating that is most effective. And, it hasn't been conclusively shown that the practice causes people to live longer or prevents them from getting certain chronic diseases.

Some short-term studies have found meditation can improve cognitive abilities such as attention and memory, said Dr. Doraiswamy. Using imaging, scientists have shown that meditation can improve the functional performance of specific circuits in the brain and may reduce age-related shrinkage of several brain centers, particularly those that may be vulnerable in disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

In a study published last year in the American Heart Association journal Circulation:

Government-funded research also is exploring meditation's effect on dieting and depression.波

士顿柏斯以色列狄肯尼斯医学中心(Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center)开出的医嘱中会包含一项令人难以置信的处方：

冥想。