Posts Tagged ‘heart attack’

John Hagelin speaks on meditation as a powerful tool for health, education & post-traumatic stress at TEDxWomen 2012

December 6, 2012

Enjoy this powerful, clear and concise talk by John Hagelin at TEDxWomen 2012 in The Paley Center for Media, Washington, DC. The theme of the 2-day conference was The Space Between. Dr. Hagelin’s PowerPoint presentation highlighted meditation as a powerful tool for health, education and post-traumatic stress. He concluded his presentation with a short video of how people’s stressed lives were transformed by the Transcendental Meditation technique. These at-risk groups were able to learn TM through scholarships from the David Lynch Foundation. Dr. Hagelin’s concluding remarks beautifully summed up the saliant point of his talk delivered in Session Two, Saturday morning, Dec 1, 2012, published Dec 4, 2012 by : “The Space Between” –TED Conference Explores the Value of Meditation.

“Medically, scientifically, the most powerful antidote to stress, and the key to optimal brain functioning, is to transcend.” — John Hagelin.

John Hagelin, Ph.D., is a world-renowned quantum physicist, science and public policy expert, educator, author, and leading proponent of peace.

Dr. Hagelin has conducted pioneering research at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics) and SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). He is responsible for the development of a highly successful Grand Unified Field Theory based on the superstring—a theory that was featured in a cover story of Discover magazine.

In addition, Dr. Hagelin is one of the world’s preeminent researchers on the effects of meditation on brain development, and the use of meditation to address critical problems in the field of education, rehabilitation, and post-traumatic stress.

Dr. Hagelin is a recipient of the prestigious Kilby Award, which recognizes scientists who have made “major contributions to society through their applied research in the fields of science and technology.” The award recognized Dr. Hagelin as “a scientist in the tradition of Einstein, Jeans, Bohr and Eddington.”

Dr. Hagelin has appeared often on ABC’s Nightline and Politically Incorrect, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s Larry King Live!, and other programs. He has been regularly featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other major metropolitan newspapers.

TEDxWomen was curated and produced by The Paley Center for Media. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

Also see The Power of The Collective, by John Hagelin | John Hagelin — “Only Higher Consciousness Can Transform Our World” — Beyond Awakening Blog | Conscious TV: John Hagelin – The Core of Nature | John Hagelin, Ph.D., Speaks on the Nature of Consciousness and the Universe

Meditation could slash the risk of heart attack and stroke (and make you less angry) — Daily Mail

November 13, 2012

Meditation could slash the risk of heart attack and stroke (and make you less angry)

  • Twice daily mantra meditation, where a sound is made repeatedly, may also reduce blood pressure

By Anna Hodgekiss

PUBLISHED: 15:03 EST, 13 November 2012 | UPDATED: 15:03 EST, 13 November 2012

Twice daily mantra meditation, which involves making a sound repeatedly, lowers death rates from heart attack and strokes

Meditation helps reduce the risk of suffering a heart attack or a stroke, according to a new study.

Researchers found that Transcendental Meditation, made popular by the Beatles during the flower power era of the 1960s, could cut heart attack rates by half.

This type of meditation, which involves making a sound repeatedly, lowers death rates from heart attack and strokes.

In the new study, researchers found that people with heart disease who practised transcendental meditation for 20 minutes twice a day were 48 per cent less likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die from all causes compared with those who attended a health education class over more than five years.

Those practicing meditation also lowered their blood pressure and reported less stress and anger.

And the more regularly patients meditated, the greater their survival, said researchers who conducted the study at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Lead researcher Dr Robert Schneider, director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention in Iowa, said: ‘We hypothesised that reducing stress by managing the mind-body connection would help improve rates of this epidemic disease.

‘It appears that transcendental meditation is a technique that turns on the body’s own pharmacy – to repair and maintain itself.’

For the study, researchers randomly assigned 201 people – with an average age of 59 – to participate in a transcendental meditation stress-reducing programme or a health education class about lifestyle modification for diet and exercise.

Transcendental Meditation was made popular by the Beatles during the flower power era of the 1960s

The average BMI of the people involved was 32 – classed as obese.

Both groups showed beneficial changes in exercise and alcohol consumption, and the meditation group showed a trend towards reduced smoking.

Although there were no significant differences between the groups in weight, exercise or diet, regular meditation was correlated with reduced death, heart attack and stroke.

Dr Schneider added: ‘Transcendental meditation may reduce heart disease risks for both healthy people and those with diagnosed heart conditions.

‘The research on transcendental meditation and cardiovascular disease is established well enough that doctors may safely and routinely prescribe stress reduction for their patients with this easy to implement, standardised and practical programme.’

The findings were published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

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More news coverage: Transcendental Meditation May Lower Heart Risk: WebMD Heart Disease Health Center and Transcendental Meditation may reduce death, heart attack and stroke in heart patients—AHA and Science Codex: Meditation may reduce death, heart attack and stroke in heart patients

The Daily Mail does not explain Transcendental Meditation properly. We do not repeatedly make a sound. It is a silent mental practice of experiencing the thought process at more refined levels until the mind transcends thought and arrives at an inner state of restful alertness. This natural level of deep rest releases stress and allows the body to repair itself resulting in improved health.

Hard evidence grows for including meditation in government-sponsored health programs

October 17, 2012

Hard evidence grows for including meditation in government-sponsored health programs was released on EurekAlert! October 17, 2012.

More people still die from cardiovascular disease than any other illness. Dubbed the number one killer and the silent killer, modern medicine has been researching and incorporating complementary and alternative approaches to help treat and in some cases reverse and hopefully prevent this health problem at an earlier stage of the disease. One of those modalities is meditation.

A new research review paper on the effects of the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique on the prevention and treatment of heart disease among youth and adults provides the hard evidence needed to include such evidence-based alternative approaches into private- and government-sponsored wellness programs aimed at preventing and treating cardiovascular disease.

The paper, “Prevention and Treatment of Cardiovascular Disease in Adolescents and Adults through the Transcendental Meditation® Program: A Research Review Update” is published in Current Hypertension Reviews, 2012, Vol. 8, No. 3.

• In teens, the TM technique has been found to reduce blood pressure, improve heart structure and improve school behavior. According to the paper, the technique has been shown to be a safe alternative. The NIH-sponsored clinical trials conducted with TM mentioned in this review did not observe any adverse effects from TM practice.

• In adults the technique reduced stress hormones and other physiological measures of stress and produced more rapid recovery from stress, decreased blood pressure and use of blood pressure medication, decreased heart pain in angina patients, cleared the arteries, reducing the risk of stroke, improved distance walked in patients with congestive heart failure, and decreased alcohol and tobacco use, anxiety, depression, and medical care usage and expenditures. The technique also decreased risk of death from heart disease, cancer, and all causes.

“These findings have important implications for inclusion of the Transcendental Meditation program in medical efforts to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Vernon Barnes, lead author and research scientist at Georgia Health Sciences University, in Augusta, Georgia.

“This review is potentially more important than individual research papers because it shows that TM has an integrated, holistic effect on all levels of cardiovascular disease,” says co-author, Dr. David Orme-Johnson.

Orme-Johnson says that no other meditation technique has been shown to produce this constellation of changes, especially when it comes to hard measures of cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Barnes said it was important to start preventing heart disease with adolescents before the disease sets. “Adding Transcendental Meditation at a young age could prevent future cardiovascular disease and save many lives, not to mention reduce the national medical bill by billions of dollars.”

This model shows how regular practice of the Transcendental Meditation Program may reduce chronic stress, which in turn reduces CVD risk factors and improves stress reactivity, thereby decreasing cardiovascular disease, and consequential morbidity and mortality.

Uniqueness of the Transcendental Meditation technique

The uniqueness of the outcomes of the TM technique may have something to do with the mechanics of the practice of the technique itself says Dr. Barnes. “Meditation practices are different from each other and therefore produce different results. And this is a very important consideration when evaluating the application of meditation as an alternative and complementary medical approach.”

A paper in Consciousness and Cognition discusses three categories to organize and better understand meditation. See Are all meditation techniques the same?

The two common categories are focused attention, concentrating on an object or an emotion, like compassion; and open monitoring, being mindful of one’s breath or thoughts, either contemplating the meaning of them, or just observing them.

Transcendental Meditation uses a different approach and comes under the third category of automatic self-transcending, meditations that transcend their own activity.

The TM technique does not employ any active form of concentration or contemplation, but allows the mind to effortlessly experience the thought process at more refined levels until thinking comes to a quiet settled state without any mental activity. The mind is awake inside and the body is resting deeply, a level of rest much deeper than deep sleep. It is this state of restful alertness that allows the body to make the necessary repairs to rebalance its normal functioning. This cumulative process resets the physiology and shows up as reduced symptoms of cardiovascular disease and improved health.

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The EurekAlert! press release was publicized by other medical and science websites like Science Codex, PhysOrg, and PsychCentral: Meditation Technique Lowers Stress, Improves Cardiovascular Health. Medical News Today reported: Evidence Suggests That Meditation Should Be Included In Government-Sponsored Health Programs and embedded the video of Dr. Oz talking about TM. Holistic Future: Evidence shows Transcendental Meditation prevents heart disease

For a clear comprehensive understanding see Transcendental Meditation Visualized [Infographic].

South Asian Heart Center uses Transcendental Meditation to prevent and manage heart disease

May 12, 2012

South Asians are becoming painfully aware of the high incidence of heart attacks, often fatal, frequently among seemingly healthy, trim, and physically active close family & friends.

The South Asian Heart Center (SAHC) at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California has developed a four-pronged approach to prevent and successfully manage heart disease among men and women of South Asian descent living and working in America. Here is an introduction to their work presented by Executive Director Ashish Mathur, and SAHC Medical Director Cesar Molina, MD, FACC: South Asian Heart Center Helps South Asians Fight Heart Disease.

In this fourth of a four-part series on Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes Dr. Molina focuses on the importance of deep rest and its effect on heart-health and diabetes. He specifically covers the importance of meditation (or restful alertness) on longevity and health, and the science behind the effective technique of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which produces a “hypo-metabolic state of restful alertness.” Learn the evidence on the profound impact of this unique form of meditation on a whole class of chronic ailments. This is a very clear and comprehensive presentation!

South Asian Heart Center Webinar: TLC – Restful Sleep & Restful Alertness April 25, 2012, published on Apr 26, 2012 by sahcsathi.

At 26:26 of Part 4, Dr. César Molina begins talking about resting while awake with Transcendental Meditation and how it impacts our health, especially for South Asians and their propensity toward heart disease. One of the therapeutic modalities from the South Asian Heart Center is Transcendental Meditation as a stress-reduction technique. Dr. Molina reviews his talk starting at 56:18. He summarizes the lifestyle methodology to prevent heart disease and enhance longevity at the South Asian Heart Center: nutrition, physical activity, the importance of restful sleep, and the importance and benefit for stress reduction through Transcendental Meditation decreasing cardiovascular risk factors, decreasing hospital expenditures and admissions, and enhancing longevity.

Dr. César Molina presents Wednesday Lunch-hour Webinar Series TLC: Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes. Here are the 4 topics where you can download the video and a PDF of the main points and graphs for each talk. The recommendations can be applied to all Americans regardless of ethnicity or geographical location.

1. TLC: Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes Overview: May 2, noon
2. TLC: Exercise as Medicine: May 9, noon
3. TLC: The Dinner vs. the Diner: May 30, noon
4. TLC: Restful Sleep and Restful Alertness: June 20, noon

For more information: www.southasianheartcenter.org and www.tm.org.

KTVO 3: M.U.M. Gets $1 Million Research Grant

September 26, 2009

MUM gets $1 million research grant

Friday, September 25, 2009 at 6:37 p.m.

FAIRFIELD, IOWA — University Receives $1 Million NIH Grant for Mind-Body Medicine Research

The National Institutes of Health recently awarded a grant of $500,000 per year for two years for research on the Transcendental Meditation® technique in the treatment of coronary heart disease in African Americans.

The research is a collaboration between Maharishi University of Management Research Institute’s Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention and Columbia University Medical School in New York.

The funding comes from the American Recovery and Investment Act, via the NIH-National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

About 21,000 applications were submitted to NIH for these specific funds, with just 3% receiving grants.

“This recent achievement continues to place MUM Research Institute and its research on the Transcendental Meditation technique and Maharishi Vedic MedicineSM programs in an elite category in academic medicine,” said project director Robert Schneider, M.D., F.A.C.C., and dean of the Maharishi College of Perfect Health.

The research will compare the effectiveness of cardiac rehabilitation with and without the Transcendental Meditation program, especially after a heart attack. The study will utilize positron emission tomography (PET) to image and quantify changes in heart disease in the patients.

The Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention team includes Sanford Nidich, EdD, Carolyn King, PhD, Maxwell Rainforth, PhD, John Salerno, PhD, Marilyn Ungaro, Laura Alcorn, and Linda Heaton.

See video: http://bit.ly/13D7d4

KTVO Medical News


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