Improve Shoulder Pain with Brief Meditation
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindfulness also helps deconstruct the pain: Rather than seeing it as a solid block that has taken over a part of your body, you go into the pain and see moments of pressure, moments of burning, moments of iciness, etc,” – Sharon Salzberg
We all have to deal with pain. It’s inevitable, but hopefully it’s mild and short lived. For a wide swath of humanity, however, pain is a constant in their lives. At least 100 million adult Americans have chronic pain conditions. The most common treatment for chronic pain is drugs. These include over-the-counter analgesics and opioids. But opioids are dangerous and highly addictive. Prescription opioid overdoses kill more than 14,000 people annually. So, there is a great need to find safe and effective ways to lower the psychological distress and improve the individual’s ability to cope with the pain.
There is an accumulating volume of research findings that demonstrate that mindfulness practices, in general, are effective in treating pain. Shoulder pain is a very common musculoskeletal complaint. The effects of meditation and acupressure on chronic shoulder pain have received little research attention.
In today’s Research News article “Reduced Pain by Mind-Body Intervention Correlates with Improvement of Shoulder Function in People with Shoulder Pain: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8970874/ ) Kang and colleagues recruited adults with chronic shoulder pain and randomly assigned them to a wait-list control condition or to receive a 5 minute meditation plus acupressure treatment. They were measured before and after treatment for pain, activities of daily living, range of motion, and strength.
They found that in comparison to the wait-list controls and the baseline after meditation and acupressure treatment there was a significant reduction in pain intensity and a significant improvement in range of motion. Thus, a brief meditation plus acupressure treatment appears to have a beneficial effect for chronic shoulder pain patients. Whether these effects are lasting has yet to be determined.
So, relieve shoulder pain with brief meditation.
“Research shows that meditation uses neural pathways that make the brain less sensitive to pain and increases use of the brain’s own pain-reducing opioids.” – Deborah Weatherspoon
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Kang, H., An, S. C., Kim, B., Song, Y., Yoo, J., Koh, E., Lee, S., & Yang, H. J. (2022). Reduced Pain by Mind-Body Intervention Correlates with Improvement of Shoulder Function in People with Shoulder Pain: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine : eCAM, 2022, 6149052. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/6149052
Abstract
Meditation and acupressure-like stimulations have been shown to relieve pain. The aim of this study was to determine whether a short bout of mind-body intervention combined with meditation and acupressure-like stimulation was able to alleviate shoulder pain and improve its function in a short time window. Sixty-five adults with shoulder pain were recruited and randomly classified into two groups. One group participated in an intervention which consisted of acupressure-like stimulation and meditation over a 5 min period. The other group was instructed to rest during this time. A visual analog scale (VAS) pain score and objective constant scores were measured before and after intervention to determine shoulder pain and range of motion (ROM), respectively. A two-way repeated measures analysis of variance with Bonferroni correction and a regression analysis were performed. VAS pain, objective constant score, flexion, abduction, and external rotation score showed significant interactions between time and group. The pain intensity was significantly reduced, while flexion and abduction were significantly improved, in the experimental group compared to the control group, after the intervention. In addition, the change of flexion negatively correlated with the change of pain intensity in the experimental group, but not in the control group. These results show that a short-term application of mind-body intervention significantly alleviates shoulder pain and improves shoulder movement, suggesting its potential use as a therapy for people with shoulder pain.