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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

To say mindfulness and meditation is pseudoscientific is totally absurd. There's has been a ton of proper science aimed at it, all the scientific consensus is that it has an effect far beyond placebo.

You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because some "out there" people also like it. You might as well stop eating healthy because Acai berries are hip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness#Scientific_researc...

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Did you read your own link? One line from it mentions the study that actually brought me to this conclusion:

"A meta-analysis on meditation research published in JAMA in 2014,[167] (that included a combined total of 3515 participants), found insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight."

While there may be other with differing results it's... pretty sketchy in any case. I would hardly say scientific enough to belong in such a class.

I had a look at this when I considered meditation once but found it'd most likely just be a waste of my time. I'd rather not flush my time down the toilet.

I started practicing mindfulness after seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist for anxiety. One of the core parts of CPT are learning how to relax your mind (I’d literally have all these thoughts racing through my head that were barely grounded in to any kind of reality). Practicing mindfulness instead of letting my mind wander into dark places effectively cured me of my anxiety. And that’s not just one anecdote, CBT is the gold standard in science-based therapy right now.

That quote is very dishonestly misleading, as the same study found it had evidence of improved anxiety, less depression and pain.

You also cherry picked the negative paragraph for some reason, despite the above paragraph on the Wikipedia article citing a newer meta study with other positive results.

I only focused on the JAMA study as I'd seen it before, sorry about that I see it may have looked pretty slanted now, I wanted to have a better look at the positive metaanalysis, however the link on wikipedia was broken, look at where it points on wikipedia, you'll see "Cite error: The named reference Gotink was invoked but never defined (see the help page)."

I'm not disagreeing with you about that depression and anxiety thing, but it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest it to a generally mentally healthy person.

Finally someone on HN who is not gaga about meditation. :-P

In my understanding, meditation simply enables one to develop a heightened form of emotional detachment that may help deal with life's vicissitudes. Of course, that's again treating the symptoms and does nothing to cure the unhappiness.

Note that most of the research referenced there isn't properly controlled - it's sort of hard to control for something like that, you'd have to have a therapy that could offer something comparable without matching it, so comparing it's effectiveness to placebo seems in some ways quite apt.

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