Anxiety and Cancer
posted by Martin Boroson on April 25 2012
Every day, it is more and more obvious to me how much money could be saved in healthcare by promoting meditation.
First of all, meditation could help cut down on patient visits and psychosomatic complaints. Then of course there are all the stress-related conditions that can be helped by meditation. (More info on meditation for stress relief here.)
Now here is a study from Stanford University showing that anxiety-prone mice develop more severe cancer then their calm counterparts. I am not sure how the researchers found anxiety-prone mice, and I certainly hope that they didn’t induce anxiety in the mice. Nor am I sure how I would teach mice to meditate,
But one conclusion seems obvious to me: If we could teach anxious people to meditate, and meditate precisely when they feel the most anxiety (e.g. when having medical treatment or when they develop a life-threatening illness) this would surely have some positive effect.
