'The impossible has become the common experience' of people who practise Transcendental Meditation regularly
by Linda Egenes

Transcendental Meditation Magazine    Translate This Article
16 May 2014



Research by Robert E. Herron, Ph.D., published in the American Journal of Health Promotion 2011; 26(1): 56-60, found a 28 percent reduction in doctors' bills over five years from baseline for persistent high-cost people who practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique.

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Part 4 of a recent interview with Dr. Robert Herron,* in which he discusses the current U.S. healthcare crisis and how the Transcendental Meditation technique can help prevent chronic disease and reduce costs.

Linda Egenes: I understand that you've published a number of research studies on healthcare costs. Can you talk about your research?

Dr. Robert Herron: The most recent study was published in the American Journal of Health Promotion in 2011. The results indicated that people with consistently high doctors' bills experienced a 28 percent cumulative decrease in physician fees after an average of five years of TM practice. Even after the first year of meditation, the TM group's physicians' bills declined by 11 percent.

What did these findings mean? First of all, the research demonstrated that the largest and quickest reductions in medical costs could be achieved by providing the TM program to people with consistently high healthcare costs—the very people who are driving up the costs of healthcare today.

Secondly, it showed that a nonmedical intervention, the Transcendental Meditation technique, resulted in a statistically significant decline in healthcare usage that persisted for five years. In other words, with the group that practiced TM, the number of times they visited the doctor was less at the end of the five-year study than it had been at the start of the study.

This kind of decline in healthcare usage had never been shown before. Prior to this research, health economists and leaders hoped that someday the best interventions might be able to, at best, slow down the rate of increase in medical expenses.

Thus leaders in the field of healthcare had never even imagined that a decline in healthcare usage would be possible for this group of chronically ill patients. Yet because the TM technique has such a powerful health-enhancing effect, the impossible has become the common experience of people who meditate regularly.

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Global Good News will continue to feature excerpts from the interview with Dr. Herron in which he describes published research showing reduced health care costs for people practicing Transcendental Meditation.

* Robert E. Herron, Ph.D., is an independent researcher, writer, speaker, and consultant in medical cost reduction and economic policy, and director of the Center for Holistic Systems Analysis in Fairfield, Iowa, USA.

See related articles:
∙ An affordable solution to healthcare
∙ Can Transcendental Meditation help lower healthcare costs?
∙ Transcendental Meditation reduces stress, improves health, decreases costs

Copyright © 2014 Maharishi Foundation USA



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