Teaching meditation to medical students

Abstract

Given the secular and scientific atmosphere of most current American medical practice, the current high degree of interest in meditative techniques among laymen1 has been met with a mixture of surprise and hostility by the medical community. As a result of increasing media exposure, patients have begun to expect that physicians know something about these techniques and about their medical applications. Pressure from patients is supplemented by several careful physiological and clinical studies that have produced noteworthy results.2 Unfortunately, this growth of public interest has not been matched by a similar development in the information level of practicing physicians on the subject. Part of this lag may be attributed to traditional medical conservatism, which probably plays a useful role in protecting patients from ineffective or dangerous health care fads. In addition to the conservatism of physicians, however, certain characteristics of the meditative systems themselves have made it easy for doctors to avoid this subject and to dismiss it when patients raise it. Many meditative techniques originate in cultures that are perceived by some Ameri cans as foreign, "primitive," or both. Physicians also worry about the religious implications of some meditative systems and about "mixing" science and religion. In addition, there is a great deal of variability in technical expertness and professional integrity among different teachers and techniques both here and abroad. In an effort to introduce medical students to meditative techniques while their scientific orientation was most intense and before they had a chance to develop extensive professional "prejudices," I offered an elective course in Meditation and Healing for firstand second-year students at the Temple University School of Medicine. My perspective was that of a full-time academic psychiatrist who had studied several meditative systems and had employed