bill moyers came to us
probably fifteen years ago
%uh with the idea which later became a television series and a best selling book called
healing and the mind
it was a real turning point in the way
people thought about the mind-body relationship
in the context of health
and %uh
he
and %uh you know at the time he
put this series together
moyers was a real pioneer and there was virtually no medical school in the country that was
teaching alternative medicines
alternative medicine generally
%uh and meditation
in particular
and he
with with his usual brillisnt reporting
pulled together the stories of how
alternative
medicine was really
changing the landscape
below
below the horizon at the time he did this series
but he encouraged us to support this series he did and we were supporting
doctors
and healing centers that were carrying this work forward
perhaps the most prominent one who was featured on the moyers serious was a man named Jon
Kabat-Zinn
who %uh %uh
was at the university of massachusetts medical center
and introduced something which he called mindfulness based stress reduction
and that was a kind of a meditative skill he was teaching people
who were suffering from chronic pain
how to use medication and other mindfulness based stress reduction techniques to deal
with their pain and to manage it
and how
people who are
suffering from cardiac disease
could reduce their risk by regularly
practicing meditation
moyers analyzed
Kabot-Zinn's work
in subsequent years has become %uh
a widely practiced
part of medical training
and what goes on in hospitals across the country
to deal with the stress of illness
stress %uh related to cardiac disease and other areas where it arises
interestingly %uh while this has been going forward
the kind of scientific evidence which you
mention has also been developed
%uh there's been the most extraordinary use of the most sophisticated kind of
%uh brain scan technology
to show
how meditation works
on the mind
it's not just
%uh a kind of an eastern practice which makes people feel better
what magnetic resonance
%uh m_r_i_
imaging
has shown is that
meditation actually changes the function and the structure of the brain
physiologically
that structures of the brain
appear different
for people who have been meditating people and people who haven't
so the skeptics who just said well this is a kind of an the eastern
fad are now starting to recognize that there's something really important here
the possibilities here
in the medical field we've talked about
also people are starting to think about
including
periods of meditative training for small children
particularly with in connection with
attention deficit disorder
here meditation is a way of training attention
and for children who have been
spent too much time in front of television sets
they need a retraining
to help them
to focus and to be attentive over a period of time
and that's the possibility that that early work
suggests in going forward