[vidarh]

Your source does not support your claim that research has not shown that meditation beats a placebo.

Apart from pointing out that "meditation" is a wide ranging concept that includes a vast number of different, often contradictory, practices, and that a lot of the research is of poor quality (given the number of "research" papers coming out of TM affiliated sources alone - see blow -, that should not be a surprise), it relates a claim in a report from 2007 that amongst others claim "Firm conclusions on the effects of meditation practices in healthcare cannot be drawn based on the available evidence". Without looking at what was covered in the papers that report looked at, this is not enough to support your claim.

The closest the article comes to dealing with the issue of placebo explicitly, is in referring to another article focusing on TM. TM is a cult-like money-grabbing business promoting one very specific form of meditation, and hardly representative of all forms of meditation practices. They're also one of the groups doing a lot of work to assist in churning out pseudo-science research papers to support their business, and as such did a lot to damage the overall quality of meditation research.

[jschwartzi]

It might be possible to do a double-blind study on meditation, but you would have to be incredibly strict about the procedure for achieving a meditative state, and you would have to select people who know nothing about "meditation" as a practice both to administer bouts of meditation and to participate in the study. Then your part in the study would be to teach the controls the "placebo" practice and to teach the non-controls the strictly-defined meditative practice, and to convince all of the participants that they're meditating either way.

[stolio]

Unless you're testing Zen meditation in which case the placebo group and the real group may not (should not?) be distinguishable from one another.

It's often taught as "just sitting" so by the time you get the control group to sit down, shut up and hold still for half an hour every day they're doing the practice. Heck, they may be doing it better than the Zen meditators because they won't have anything extra attached to it at all :)

[return0]

Conversely though, claiming the opposite is also wrong. Many people feel that meditation is good for many things, but that emotion is not science.

[r00fus]

> "emotion is not science"

However, study of emotional response can be part of the scientific process. In fact, that's the basis of the advertising industry.

If I have tested meditation and found it predictably alters my moods (and similar examinations have been done for friends/family), is it fair to claim that is not science?

[vidarh]

It is not science, but in the context of the original "start meditating" quip on this thread, it is what matters: If it works, it solves the original problem, whether or not it works because o the placebo effect or something else.