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Mindfulness Meditation Interventions for Long COVID: Biobehavioral Gene Expression and Neuroimmune Functioning (2022) Porter & Jason

Discussion in 'Long Covid research' started by Milo, Nov 8, 2022.

  1. Milo

    Milo Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Mindfulness Meditation Interventions for Long COVID: Biobehavioral Gene Expression and Neuroimmune Functioning

    Nicole Porter *, Leonard A Jason *

    Center for Community Research, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

    *These authors contributed equally to this work


    Abstract:

    Some individuals infected with SARS CoV-2 have developed Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC) or what has been referred to as Long COVID.

    Efforts are underway to find effective treatment strategies for those with Long COVID.

    One possible approach involves alternative medical interventions, which have been widely used to treat and manage symptoms of a variety of medical problems including post-viral infections.

    Meditation has been found to reduce fatigue and unrefreshing sleep, and for those with post-viral infections, it has enhanced immunity, and reduced inflammatory-driven pathogenesis.

    Our article summarizes the literature on what is known about mindfulness meditation interventions, and reviews evidence on how it may apply to those with Long COVID and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).

    Evidence is reviewed suggesting effective and sustainable outcomes may be achieved for symptomatology and underlying pathology of post-viral fatigue (PASC and ME/CFS).

    Full text here
     
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  2. Hutan

    Hutan Moderator Staff Member

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    So, 'positive well-being boosts immune response'. 'There is some evidence that ME/CFS causes the immune system to overreact following infection'. So, 'let's treat that high and ongoing immune response with something that boosts immune response'. :confused:


    It's disappointing to see Leonard Jason messing around with this stuff. We know that meditation doesn't fix ME/CFS. Pretending that it does just feeds the idea that our symptoms would go away if we just stopped being so neurotic.

    There are a lot of papers cited as proving evidence that meditation/mindfulness/yoga improves lowers inflammation, and therefore can help fix PASC and ME/CFS. Lots of leaps of logic including assuming what happens in acute Covid continues to happen in Long Covid.
     
  3. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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    That was my take too. Lots of stuff unrelated to ME/CFS being used to justify the idea that meditation may help in ME/CFS and LC. A whole string of maybes amounting to nothing. Not good enough.

    It sounds to me like a postgrad student project. The next step will probably be a small study with Long Covid patients, probably without a control group.
     
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  4. Mij

    Mij Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    If this is the case then why doesn't it prevent LC or death? Should we get rid of vaccines in this case and give out yoga mats? :emoji_thinking:
     
  5. DokaGirl

    DokaGirl Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    :thumbup:

    ETA: But, maybe we would be risking an anti-matter protest! ;)
     
  6. DokaGirl

    DokaGirl Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Yes, disappointing that Lenny Jason would be involved in this.
     
  7. Hutan

    Hutan Moderator Staff Member

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    175. Khanpour Ardestani S, Karkhaneh M, Stein E, et al. Systematic review of mind-body interventions to treat myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Medicina. 2021;57(7):652. doi:10.3390/medicina57070652
    Thread here: Systematic Review of Mind-Body Interventions to Treat Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, 2021, Ardestani et al

    This is an example of the naive approach taken in this paper. A meta-review of interventions found that meditation didn't improve ME/CFS - so, let's make the interventions longer. And an 8 day retreat including meditation, but also deep rest with no conversation, with healthy meals provided - of course a person with ME/CFS is going to feel better. The reference for that 8 day intervention is just the systematic review - it would be interesting to track down the actual study and see what positive biological outcomes there were.

    It's not the papers from the BPS people that make me lose a bit of hope. It's papers like these, supervised by a professor with ME/CFS who has researched ME/CFS for years. He should be as well informed as anyone, and yet he encourages a paper full of the tired old misperceptions of ME/CFS and immunology. If he isn't producing critical, well-informed experts in ME/CFS, who is?

    (I should add that I'm not anti-meditation, I think practices that bring about calmness are good. For me, it's gardening. But, if meditation fixed ME/CFS, or even brought about a meaningful improvement beyond slightly better well-being, we would know.)
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2022
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  8. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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    My attempts at meditation since having ME if anything made me feel worse. It takes a lot of mental effort and concentration to clear the mind and focus only on one's breathing, or a candle flame, or whatever the particular guided meditation asked me to do.
     
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  9. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    It is disappointing that Jason does not appear to be sufficiently in the loop to realise that PWME do not want poorly argued research like this.
     
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  10. Lilas

    Lilas Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    ... and méditate with cognitive problems ?! :confused: Simply impossible. Before ME, I "meditated" in my own way from time to time, but since ME, I can only do it for 30 seconds. max.! Now, I only find rest in silence, lying down and letting my mind wander freely, that's all.

    "Mediation heals, the power of self-healing", it is just the same old panacea idea repeated .
     
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  11. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Uh, yeah, because there's nothing professional grade. That doesn't make it a good thing. It's the same reason people used to do weird stuff back then, that didn't make them any good. We really shouldn't be dealing with nonsense like this.

    As for meditation "enhancing immunity", we are in "detox" or "optimizing" territory here. Words that simply mean nothing.
     
  12. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Isn't meditation non-interventional mindemptying?
    I can't quite get my head around it.
     
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  13. Milo

    Milo Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    that's a big claim. I wonder whether ICU's from around the world told their patients to meditate non-stop in order to get better and then later blame the patients for dying?

    I have a hard time wrapping my head around this very fact that you can meditate your illness back to health. Nope. Leave the alternative medicine and the woo-woo out of my health care.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2022
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  14. NelliePledge

    NelliePledge Moderator Staff Member

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    It’s like so many of these things we’re entreated to do to improve health. Eating kale doing some yoga or as advised by Gerada getting off the bus a stop earlier and walking more, all things that can make a non-ill person a bit fitter. A bit of light meditation can be good if you are a healthy and have a hectic lifestyle and don’t take time out to relax.


    when I was still pushing myself to try to get back to work I used to flop on the sofa after my 5 hour stints and lie there listening to a 40 minute guided meditation. At the time I thought it was the meditation helping me relax and switch off/recompose myself. Since discovering the existence of orthostatic intolerance and in view of the cognitive exertion I was putting myself through in retrospect I now see it’s most likely that it was the 40 minutes lying down that helped me with the soothing background music/speaking being just something to occupy my mind.

    Nowadays I spend more time horizontal and I don’t feel the need to listen to guided meditation at all. Not for a couple of years. If I want to relax I just put classic fm smooth classics on.

    i guess for any PWME who struggle to relax it might be helpful but there are pitfalls with some meditations being upsetting imagery, some voices can be grating. And it depends on the content if it’s entreating you to change behaviour or by focusing on something you want you can make it happen that could do your head in. It is not necessarily a benign process.
     
  15. Milo

    Milo Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    The problem could be compounded by delaying treatment by physicians who don't know any better and prescribe mindfulness before sending out for testing, starting pharmaceutical treatment or referring to a specialist. It could be a delaying tactic in order to save money (particularly for those in socialized health care systems) and could have grave consequences.
    Imagine if this made it on the front page of NYT and Wapo? It would mean that patients lose credibility in requesting care because supposedly we have this DIY "treatment"
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2022
  16. RedFox

    RedFox Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Excellent example of how a supposedly harmless, but ineffective, treatment can indirectly cause harm.
     
  17. hellytheelephant

    hellytheelephant Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Meditation does not exist as a ' treatment'- it is a way to live better with reality ( IMO). I have been meditating for 30 plus years and it is NOT a medical intervention!
     
  18. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    And yet, this was always the natural course this ideology would take, to pretend that it is. Anyone up for some CBT: Cognitive Buddhism Therapy? It's not as if there's any actual difference, about as much as mispronouncing the words while taking the Book of the dead.
    https://twitter.com/user/status/1590055605422940160

    Mind. Body. Spirit. Well that's basically the psychosocial model. The model has shifted over the years to mostly become biopsychosocialspiritual, which is still the same pseudoscience in the end.

    Heheheh. "Facts matter". Just like Sense about science's "evidence matters".
     
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  19. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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    When I first learned about and tried mindfulness meditation about 50 years ago it was in the context of people from Western cultures, mostly in the USA and UK travelling to India and other Asian countries seeking spiritual enlightenment. It was part of the hippie scene and was linked with music, drugs and alternative lifestyles.

    Alternative medicine expanded rapidly, but I don't recall meditation being taken up by mainstream medicine until much more recently when it became stripped of its religious roots and watered down into a 'treatement' for stress and anything psychologists and doctors decided they could attribute to stress.
     
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  20. Sean

    Sean Moderator Staff Member

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    Kinda ironic, isn't it, that one of the long-standing arguments from the psychosocial set is about the 'medicalisation' of human behaviour by the rest of medicine.
     

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