Does Meditation Improve Your General Health?

Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years. Over the course of the 20th century, teachers and researchers have taken a good deal of the mystic aspect of this practice and separated it from the actual practice itself, to help those in the West receive its benefits without the need to involve them in the spiritual aspect.

Of course, many in the West who practice meditation do involve themselves with the spiritual side, and this is something that many become interested in as their journey goes forward, but the fact is, anyone can enjoy the benefits of meditation, and there are many.

But how can you find out if those who meditate are generally healthier and suffer less disease than those who do not?

An experiment was designed at Maharishi International University in Iowa which studied those who practiced meditation and those who did not, to see which group spent less time in hospital, or visiting their doctor.

The study, later published in the Psychosomatic Medicine journal, used a group of 200 meditation practitioners and 600,000 non-practitioners and studied how those in both groups used their medical insurance over a 5 year period.

The two groups were broadly similar in terms of benefits and coinsurance payments, and the proportion of men and women in the two groups.

It was found that in all the categories that the insurance covered them for, those who practised meditation were less likely to use their medical insurance. In fact, in all age groups, the meditation group had nearly 50% less inpatient and outpatient days than the non-meditation group.

OK, it's fair to assume that those who practised meditation were more likely to live a healthier lifestyle, not to smoke and eat healthy food for example, but even given this factor, the difference between the two groups is still such that the medical benefit to overall health shows that meditation is good for you. It is a simple fact that cases of mental disorder, infections and cancer, hospitalisation was far less than the norm in the meditation group.

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