The thieves in charge of the Transcendental Meditation organization have managed to persuade a reputable hospital to put out a less-than-reputable study purporting to show the benefits of TM.
Heart disease patients who practiced meditation for four months showed slight improvements in blood pressure and insulin levels, a small, government-funded study found.
Patients who learned Transcendental Meditation did better on those measures than patients who spent the same amount of time on lectures, discussions and homework assignments about the effects of stress, diet and exercise on the heart.
Adding meditation had “a strong enough effect that we could show a benefit over traditional health care, and traditional health care is pretty good now,” said study co-author Dr. Noel Bairey Merz of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “I think it’s a testimony to this intervention that we could see anything.”
Seems innocent enough, right? But why did they not have some patients, say, practice yoga, some do nothing, and some sit quietly for twenty minutes twice a day?
Well, the easy answer is: This study was paid for and administered by members of the TM organization.
Some of the researchers involved are affiliated with the organization that teaches Transcendental Meditation around the world, raising questions about potential bias, said Jim Lane of Duke University School of Medicine, who had no part in the study.
The research team included doctors from the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. The school was founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who started a movement to teach meditation worldwide and was a guru to the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
Full disclosure: I learned TM as a teenager, and my then-best friend and her family were heavily involved in the movement. They still practice it today. I attended a few major TM get-togethers, and frankly think my friend was lying when she said her sister can “fly.” Strangely enough, most TM practitioners who can “fly” won’t allow anyone to observe them, because the act of observing will cause them to be unable to do it.
Uh-huh.
Merz said she does not meditate and is not paid by the TM organization, although others on the research team were. She said the potential for bias in her study was no greater than in studies where a researcher gets financial support from a drug company.
Merz doesn’t know the hucksters she is dealing with. Their entire organization counts on people like her getting sucked into recommending TM — which carries quite a heavy price tag to learn — to poor shnooks who would otherwise be able to learn relaxation techniques for far less, if not for free.
The day that the TM organization offers its services free to hospitals and chronically ill patients, I will begin to believe that they are interested in helping people. Until then, I remain convinced that the reason this organization exists is to enrich Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his elites, at the expense of fools.
It’s not on the level as Scientology, but that’s because Maharishi doesn’t want people thinking that he is teaching a religion. He is. It is a sect of Hinduism, and the TM movement lies about that, too. But all cults lie about their true purpose.
Here you have another example of our PR media. This is a non-story, yet it’s going around the world thanks to AP and the wires services.
As for the doctors at Cedars-Sinai: They should be ashamed to put their names on this study. I would be.
Your best friends sister can FLY by using this stuff?
Where can I get some?
What? You said Transcendental Meditation?
OH! I thought you said Transcendental Medication!
My Bad… :)
Meryl,
After careful and diligent research, ‘Beeps and RoadKill’ have re-enacted your friends’ sisters’ flying experience.
http://www.whatisdeepfried.com/megoplex/420.html
In the background are the Beatles singing ‘Flying’. Chances are they experienced the same phenomenon.
Martin Gardner calls this the “Catch-22” of paranormalism: the presence of a skeptical observer nullifies the effect. His book Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus shreds a lot of newage-sewage. Recommended.
Or, cond0010, they could have just been — lying.
“…because the act of observing will cause them to be unable to do it.”
How very quantum.
I know, Meryl. Just havin’ a little fun.
I wonder how one avoids the “placebo effect” in a study like this one. What’s the sugar pill-equivalent that might lead folks to THINK that they’re meditating when they’re really not?
Hmmm, come to think of it, is TM the outfit that tries to sell you a PERSONALIZED mantra? It’d be easy to design a double-blind study to test THAT.
Putting on my professional hat on this one, and having just read the article as published in the June 12 Archives of Internal Medicine [a refereed journal which reviews, critiques, and sends back for revision articles which are poorly designed]:
The study was well designed. The patients were properly randomized. The control group had the exact same study sessions as the TM group, and these were led by heath educators teaching heard disease risk factors, the impact of stress, diet, and exersize. There were daily home assignments to control for home TM sessions.
The results showed an improvement in blood pressure and diabetic control in the TM group.
My review of this says that this was in fact a well designed, unbiased study which correlates with other studies on self-hypnosis and meditation [non-transcendental] on BP and diabetes.
Not liking the people involved does not by definition mean that this is “crap science” and that the Cedars-Sinai doctors should be ashamed to put their names on it. The fact that the TM people use this in their marketing does not detract from the good design and reasonable conclusions from this study.
It pays to read the original study before going mideval on it; credibility does suffer as a result.
I stand by my post 100%.
If the study did not include a group who simply closed their eyes and relaxed for twenty minutes, twice a day, it is crap. This study will be quoted by TM shills to hook suckers in for the next several decades. I say again: Cedars-Sinai should be ashamed to have taken part in it.
In fact it did contain controls for meditation classes. In fact, the conclusions posted in the article referred to other forms of relaxation and meditation. In fact the only role of the TM people was to provide the TM classes and sessions in that arm of the trial. They played no role in data analysis or conclusions.
I continue to suggest that you shouldn’t call a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine crap based on what someone who may not be trained to read medical research articles has to say.
With all due respect, as an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine it is part of my training to analyse published medical research. I have personally reviewed this article and it is methodologically sound. It is not crap science, and it is not crap research. The fact that the TM people will use it as propaganda does not make it crap any more than the statements of Bush are crap because AlJaziera uses them out of context for propaganda purposes.
From the article:
You said
So what were the conclusions on the control meditation groups? How significant were the differences? Did they do a study with a control group simply closing their eyes and relaxaing for 20 minutes? How about going into specifics, as the AP puff piece does not? Don’t just simply slap on your title and lecture me about how much more of an expert you are. Explain it to me. Because I’m still unconvinced.
When a hospital lets a study be used by an organization with an agenda, like the TM organization, the study is tainted. Look at the way it will be used by the TM folks:
Way to go, Cedars-Sinai. Helping hucksters defraud the public, one sucker at a time.
As I said, I read and interpret medical articles for a living. It took some years to learn how to critically analyze medical research [because some of it is in fact crap]; I’m not going to waste bandwith trying to teach you how to critically read a research article, or to “convince” you. It would appear that you began with the conclusion “TM is involved so it must be crap.”
I repeat, this article was not funded by TM; it was adequately controlled; it was appropriately randomized. It was not produced by or controlled by the TM people. You can believe whatever you want to, but don’t taint the researchers at Cedar Sinai just because you don’t like the study…
I asked specific questions; I did not ask you to teach me how to read a study report. I think “How significant were the differences” between the control meditation group and the TM meditation group is a valid question to ask, since you insist this is a valid study.
You say you have information that contradicts my assertion about this study, and then you refuse to divulge it, and I should just trust you because this is what you do for a living.
You know, when I backed up Charles Johnson on the typesetting theories behind the exposure of the faked National Guard letters, I put up several extensive posts so the layperson could understand what the type experts were saying. I didn’t just say “Trust me, I was a typesetter and I know what I’m talking about.”
That argument doesn’t fly with me.
take the 4 years it took to get the background and then the three years of weekly meetings practicing analyzing articles and you may make assertions about how to interpret medical research. Hard cold fact. It ain’t fair that not everyone can repair a TV, or even explain how they work, but that’s life.
As I said, the participation of the TM people was limited to providing the TM component of the study; they did not participate in the data analysis or the conclusions. They did not provide funding. The study did not conclude that TM was superior to other forms of meditation or relaxation; in fact they specified that they did not compare TM to other forms of relaxation techniques. They concluded that TM was superior to patient education in certain measurable quantities such as blood pressure changes or diabetic control.
The study was not biased.
The study was not poorly designed.
And your saying the argument doesn’t fly with you doesn’t change that.
You know, I just reread the article, and then my post. I think there are some words that I should change: “less-than-reputable study.”
I should change them to “flawed study.”
The study compared the difference between a group that practiced TM and a group that attended classes. You say the study did not compare TM to other forms of relaxation techniques.
This is exactly the kind of study that the TM organization has performed and pushed for for decades. It is ridiculous to say that TM had no influence on this study. Why did they have subjects perform TM? Why not yoga? Why not hypnosis? Why not Yan Xin Qigong? Why not other relaxation technques? Who put the TM bug into their ear?
It is a poorly-designed study for precisely those reasons. And it is going to be used to sucker people out of millions of dollars.
Cedars-Sinai should still be ashamed. And I still stand by what I wrote, for the most part. I yield to jumping to conclusions about who paid for the study. I missed the “government-funded” adjective.
A properly-designed study would have included at least one other form of meditation/relaxation technique to compare with the TM group. This study did not.
As for “that argument doesn’t fly with me,” it was in reference to your donning your title and experience instead of answering the questions I asked about the study. It’s a pretty poor way to respond to a question.
I wasn’t questioning your ability to read the study. I was asking questions about the study. You should learn to recognize the difference.