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Re:Mindfulness may have been over-hyped by anoncoward1234 on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @07:16PM (#17026201)
Mindfulness isn't over-hyped. Mindfulness takes effort. There's crazy videos of buddhist monks walking on their thumbs. People can raise their body temperature several degrees at will (and it's how a lot of open ocean swimmers survive, say, crossing the english channel). But it takes practice, every day, for years and you can't fake it - you're body knows you're cheating and can't be bribed.

Given that - how do you do a statistical analysis across the population of mindfulness meditation vs. pill popping? Pills always work, often with horrible debilitating side effects (yay Opioids!). Meanwhile the monk I met who learned to walk again after being confined to a wheelchair (gymnastics injury) had to sit under a tree for several years doing muscle exercises and willing the pain away.

So of course science can't rationalize it. How do you measure the strength of will of people? It's not so easy to put these sorts of things into a study. So I guess we'll keep eating the poison pill. Shrug.

Re:Mindfulness may have been over-hyped by wilsonnb on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @08:14PM (#17035465)
People heal from injuries using physical therapy on a regular basis.

I also don't know what walking on ones thumbs has to do with mindfullness.

You don't need to do a statistical analysis. We have other tools that can be used like double blind trials comparing meditation and medication.

Anyways, I think you should be very careful about placing much stock in anything that can't be studied in a scientific way. Such a thing would by definition have no measurable effect on the world or be unchangeable.

Re:Mindfulness may have been over-hyped by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @07:36PM (#17026302)
> Pills always work

We are clearly on different things.