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Quiet Mind Seminars provide strategies to the healthcare community to help professionals, patients and care-givers cope with the stresses of illness. Our trademark Mindful Reflection is adaptable to a broad spectrum of patients, hospital staff and carers. It is straightforward and intuitively accessible to anyone motivated to care for their own well-being.
Various forms of mindfulness meditation have been subjected to scientific scrutiny since the nineteen-eighties. While it is difficult to design protocols to measure such subjective methods, results and interpretations, results so far are promising.
The earliest trademarked method, Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR), was developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachussetts Medical Center. Since its inception, MBSR has evolved into a common form of complementary medicine addressing a variety of health problems. The National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has provided a number of grants to research the efficacy of the MBSR program in promoting healing. Completed studies have found that for a majority of participants pain-related drug utilization decreased while activity levels and feelings of self-esteem increased. More information on these studies can be found on the University of Massachusetts Medical School website.
The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at the University of Massachusetts has used mindfulness meditation extensively. For five straight years ranked as the best cancer hospital in New England and fourth best in the nation in U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Hospitals" survey. they staff "believe in treating the "whole patient.“ At Dana-Farber, mindfulness has been used to alleviate psychological and physical suffering of persons living with cancer, including reduction of stress symptoms, enhanced coping and well-being. Studies have been conducted on breast and prostate cancer patients as well as bone marrow transplant patients in a clinic-based group setting.
Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, S. Robert Davis Chair of Medicine in The Ohio State University College of Medicine, has demonstrated the ability of mind-body interventions to modulate endocrine and immune responses, and the role played by proinflammatory cytokines in combination with depression among cancer survivors who experience debilitating fatigue.
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