Why Mindfulness/Meditation Is a “No-Brainer” for Health-Care Professionals

Abstract

A reasonable question for the medical profession is how enthusiastic we should be about incorporating the increasingly popular modality of mindfulness/meditation into our daily lives. As the medical school curriculum is an extraordinarily demanding zero sum game which demands that any addition to the existing corpus be strongly justified, the specter of adding a thread of mindfulness/meditation in the third year course of the Art and Practice of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine has given me pause to answer the question of whether doing so may just lead to the students (and faculty) to reap some serious benefits. The topic of mindfulness itself—which loosely refers to a process of bringing one’s nonjudgmental attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, and which can be developed through the practice of meditation and other types of training—is both popular and controversial. Starting in the East as a method of cultivating mental and spiritual health to feed the soul and find enlightenment 2500 years ago, mindfulness has now come to the West and is touted as a way of destressing, enhancing memory and concentration, and generally improving well-being. Perhaps unsettlingly, mindfulness/meditation has been co-opted by such diverse groups as Goldman Sachs and the US Army in an effort to create more successful investors and better warriors. To me, the migration of meditation from the temples of the East to the boardrooms of New York and the battlefields of the world represents what I refer to as a “natural sign of danger.” Robert Wright, in his recent book “Why Buddhism Is True,” points out 2 types of contemporary blowback over mindfulness/meditation. In the West, there are those who say that the unequivocal rewards of the activity (lowered stress, increased mental alacrity, and focus) are not specific to the practice and that many of us reap similar rewards from exercising, playing a musical instrument, or merely enjoying nature. From the East, there are practitioners of a life practice of mindfulness/meditation who are challenged not to lose their equanimity of their “nonself” at the notion of Time Out magazine listing the best places and spas to meditate in New York. Considering the dialectic of these arguments, I believe the Buddha was indeed correct in advocating the middle path for all. For those of us in the health-care profession, and specifically physicians, I believe there are several lines of reasoning supporting incorporating mindfulness/meditation into our training programs and our lives. First, I suggest that there are strong arguments to be made supporting the concept that mindfulness/meditation enhances our care for our patients. The rewards of a calmer physician, capable of focusing on the moment’s work, are transparently beneficial for critical decision-making. Recognizing that we all do our best work when we are not overor underexcited in the domains of our raw energy and/or hedonic tone, mindfulness/meditation has proven benefits in its capacity to put us in the optimal zone. Studies have demonstrated that mindfulness/meditation can affect several aspects of quality including patient-centered communications and patient satisfaction (1), but there is an urgent need to further demonstrate that mindfulness can be translated into patient safety and quality of care (2). While the evidence supporting mindfulness/meditation capacity to enhance the quality of patient care is modest, there are ample evidence for its capacity to reduce emotional exhaustion, job dissatisfaction, and burnout (3,4). There are few skeptics to the assertion that medicine today is on a worrisome trajectory where providers are increasingly demanded to work harder, faster, and also be nicer to ensure enhanced patient satisfaction scores. The solution to this problem remains elusive, but remedies directed at both the individual and the institutions where they work have both been suggested (4). Unfortunately, none of the remedies are