Spiritual meditation plus medication: Best medicine for migraines?
A wide variety of pharmacological interventions such as opiates, benzodiazepines , and prophylactic medications have been described that offer partial relief to migraine sufferers. Reviews have also described a variety of empirically supported non-pharmacological approaches to preventing or stopping headaches. Recent randomized controlled trials have demonstrated the efficacy of meditation-based interventions as a treatment for headache pain. Though spiritual meditation has been found to reduce the frequency of migraines and physiological reactivity to stress, little is known about how introducing a spirituality component into a meditation intervention impacts use of analgesic medicine. The results from the study support previous research suggesting that spiritual meditation may be more effective for pain tolerance and migraine coping than non-spiritual meditation alternatives. In this study, 92 meditation-naïve participants with frequent migraines (>2 per month) were randomly ...