On Jul 18, 2012, at 3:55 AM, sparaig wrote:
Any review that big is bound to have issues. I believe I already
linked to some of them.
IIRC the ONLY people who had any problem, was the TMO. In fact, they
were so miffed at having their inadequacies exposed, they had TMO-
affiliated statisticians forward a desperate response in the form of
their own review. Now THAT'S desperate. When your sinking ship is
only being held up by Oprah and Russell Brand, it's time to abandon
ship!
It's pretty well known in Integrative circles that meditation is not
the best intervention for BP issues, so much so that my physician
prescribes yoga for moderately elevated BP.
The fact is, it was already well known that Transcendental Meditation
blood pressure research was of poor quality, and that research was
published in the Journal of Hypertension itself (!):
Insufficient evidence to conclude whether or not Transcendental
Meditation decreases
blood pressure: results of a systematic review of randomized clinical
trials.
META-ANALYSIS
Journal of Hypertension. 22(11):2049-2054, November 2004.
Canter, Peter H; Ernst, Edzard
Abstract:
Objective: To carry out an independent, systematic review of
randomized clinical trials of
Transcendental Meditation (TM) for cumulative effects on blood pressure.
Method: Searches were made of electronic databases and the collected
papers and official web
sites of the TM organization. We included only randomized clinical
trials, without confounding
co-interventions, which measured the cumulative effects of TM on
blood pressure.
Results: Six trials met the inclusion criteria but one, reported only
in abstract form, could not be
evaluated. Procedures for establishing baseline blood pressure were
adequate in only one trial.
Only one of the trials included a follow-on assessment and only one
of the evaluable trials
tested the effect of TM in hypertensive individuals. Three of the
five evaluable trials reported
statistically significant differences between intervention groups
favouring TM and two found no
significant differences between intervention groups. None of the five
studies was conducted by
independent authors without any affiliation to the TM organization.
Conclusion: All the randomized clinical trials of TM for the control
of blood pressure published
to date have important methodological weaknesses and are potentially
biased by the affiliation
of authors to the TM organization. There is at present insufficient
good-quality evidence to
conclude whether or not TM has a cumulative positive effect on blood
pressure.
