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Comment by savage_platypus | Hacker News Reader

The report concluded, "Scientific research on meditation practices does not appear to have a common theoretical perspective and is characterized by poor methodological quality. Firm conclusions on the effects of meditation practices in healthcare cannot be drawn based on the available evidence. Future research on meditation practices must be more rigorous in the design and execution of studies and in the analysis and reporting of results." (p. 6) It noted that there is no theoretical explanation of health effects from meditation common to all meditation techniques.

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You're citing from one meta study out of plenty. Also, it's ten years old. Many things have happened since then, especially things to address those weaknesses – MBSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_stress_reduct...) has been developed further, and is a method of meditation that is in part designed so that you can do science on it.

Looking at a 2013 report (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23796855), results are quite different. Or this interview (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/...) showing potential physical changes in the brain.

Furthermore, meditation isn't about objective health gains to many people. It's about living in a different way, in a different state.

Scientific research has shown that modification of behaviour and perceptions can be achieved without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention. This goes by the name of psychotherapy. In particular, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) has been shown to work in randomized controlled trials [1].

As such therapies involve only guiding and helping people to think differently, it demonstrates that such guidance has have scientifically measurable effects on the mind and body.

It follows from the above that the likelihood that practices such as meditation could have non-zero effects is high. Whether Vipassana itself does so could therefore be tested in the same manner as CBT was, and perhaps that is what should be done...

[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=randomized+contro...

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