Meditation and Yoga Does Nothing for Health

A lot of folks will read this and say “Well Duh.”  But for those true believers out there that think eastern philosophy, meditation and yoga is better than any religious experience will cry “NOOOooo!!” and then plug their ears so they won’t have to hear the truth.

But its true.  For the body, meditation, yoga, chanting, staring into candlelight, listening to new age music, burning incense, and even Tai Chi is all a bunch of baloney.  It has all the same health benefits of sitting on your ass and playing XBox.

From HealthDay here:

There’s no evidence that meditation eases health problems, according to an exhaustive review of the accumulated data by Canadian researchers.

“There is an enormous amount of interest in using meditation as a form of therapy to cope with a variety of modern-day health problems, especially hypertension, stress and chronic pain, but the majority of evidence that seems to support this notion is anecdotal, or it comes from poor quality studies,” concluded researchers Maria Ospina and Kenneth Bond of the University of Alberta/Capital Health Evidence-based Practice Centre, in Edmonton.

They analyzed 813 studies focused on the impact of meditation on various conditions, including high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and substance abuse.  Released Monday, the report looked at studies on five types of meditation practices: mantra meditation; mindfulness meditation; yoga, Tai Chi and Qi Gong.

Some of the studies suggested that certain types of meditation could help reduce blood pressure and stress and that yoga and other practices increased verbal creativity and reduced heart rate, blood pressure and cholesterol in healthy people.

However, the report authors said it isn’t possible to draw any firm conclusions about the effects of meditation on health, because the existing studies are characterized by poor methodologies and other problems.

Wow, over 800 so-called scientific studies were conducted, and when they were scrutinized by a real scientist, the methodologies used to reach the conclusions were bogus?  Say it ain’t so!  Hippie scientists would fudge their research?  And are these the same scientific methodologies used to scare everyone about global warming?