Bogus Research
TM makes lots of false claims…
RELAXATION TECHNIQUES MAY CAUSE PEOPLE WITH ANXIETY TO FEEL WORSE - Click here to read more.
TM’S UNCHALLENGED CLAIMS
TM’s claims go mostly unchallenged, in part because TM pretends to offer a secular relaxation practice while concealing the Hinduism that lies at its core. Also, TM has groomed a vast network of celebrities who endorse it. Perhaps some will reconsider their support once they understand that the relaxation derived from meditation, the main component of meditation that can help many people, is available elsewhere and virtually free.
TM promotes the endorsements of famous physicians like Dr. Oz, but Maharishi had no use for allopathic medicine. In a Resolution dated February 11, 1997, the Maharishi Vedic Medical Council resolved to ban allopathic medicine and replace it with Maharishi’s Vedic health care system.
REDUCE CRIME & BRING WORLD PEACE
The centerpiece of TM’s claims to reduce crime and bring world peace, is a fatally flawed crime reduction study conducted in 1995, in Washington D. C. Proof would come from an experiment to reduce crime in the City by 20 percent. The reduction would result from the coherence created when thousands of advanced TM practitioners would meditate together over fourteen weeks. TM described this as “The Maharishi Effect.”
CRIME REDUCTION & VOODOO SCIENCE
In his book Voodoo Science, Robert Park described a press conference held before the experiment began in which lead researcher, John Hagelin explained how the crime reduction project would be a scientific demonstration that provided proof of a unified superstring field—an abstract and highly speculative physical theory that attempts to connect all the forces in nature. According to Hagelin, large numbers of advanced TM practitioners meditating together in the same location would access this force, which he referred to as "collective consciousness."
Over the period, the highest murder rate occurred in the city’s history. At a press conference held when the study concluded, Hagelin acknowledged that the murder rate had increased, but emphasized that “brutal crime” was down. Park pondered the benefit: “Murderers shot their victims with a clean shot between the eyes rather than bludgeoning them the old-fashioned way!”
The following year, Hagelin returned with a 55-page report on the experiment. At a press conference, he claimed violent crime had dropped 18 percent. One reporter from the Washington Post queried, “An 18% reduction compared to what?” Hagelin said the actual crime rate compared to the crime that would have occurred without the meditators meditating. How did he know what the rate would have been? Hagelin answered that by using a “scientifically rigorous time-series analysis that included not only crime data but such factors as weather and fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field.”
THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCE REFUTES TM’S CLAIMS
In 1986, Heinz Pagels, then executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, wrote: “There is no known connection between meditation states and states of matter in physics. Individuals not trained professionally in modern physics could easily come to believe, based on the presentations in the Maharishi literature, that a large number of qualified scientists agree with the purported connection between modern physics and meditation methods. Nothing could be further from the truth. The notion that what physicists call 'the vacuum state' has anything to do with consciousness is nonsense. The claim that large numbers of people meditating help reduce crime and war by creating a unified field of consciousness is foolishness of a high order. The presentation of the ideas of modern physics side by side, and apparently supportive of, the ideas of the Maharishi about pure consciousness can only be intended to deceive those who might not know any better.”
THE ONE PERCENT SCAM & THE INCREASE IN CRIME NEAR THE TM WORLD HEADQUARTERS
Undeterred by the almost universal rejection by scientists of the Maharishi effect, Maharishi doubled down. He claimed that if 8,000 advanced meditators, roughly the square root of 1% of the world’s population meditated together, there would be world peace. The TM organization raised hundreds, of millions of dollars to fund the project.
According to the US Census Bureau, the population of Fairfield, Iowa, as of July 2016, was 10,206. Applying the square-root-of-one-percent formula, the coherence produced by just ten of TM’s advanced coherence producers should have resulted in a reduced crime rate in Fairfield. For well over two decades, not ten, but hundreds of yogic flyers (TM’s most advanced meditators) have conducted their coherence-generating practices in the two (male and female) Golden Dome flying centers located on the MUM campus. In addition, for several years 1200 of Maharishi’s Vedic chanters known as “pundits” live in barracks surrounded by barbed wire fences just up the road from the Fairfield campus.
Based on the massive level of coherence generated, one might reasonably expect Fairfield to be crime-free. In fact, the entire Midwestern US should be crime-free. However, FBI crime statistics tell a different story. Neighborhood Scout is a real estate platform that analyzes crime rates in communities in the US based on raw data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Using FBI crime statistics released in September 2016, Neighborhood Scout reported: The crime rate in Fairfield is considerably higher than the national average across all communities. Relative to Iowa, Fairfield has a crime rate that is higher than 94% of the state’s cities and towns of all sizes. Also, when comparing Fairfield to other communities of similarly sized populations, Neighborhood Scout found that the Fairfield crime rate (violent and property crimes combined) per thousand residents stood out as higher than most.
WHY YOU SHOULD IGNORE THE TM RESEARCH
Psychologist David Orme-Johnson is the most prolific TM researcher. Orme-Johnson created a website, TruthAboutTM.org, that rebuts negative TM studies, at times personally attacking TM critics as psychologically damaged or as religious fanatics.
The site’s heading "Societal Effects" claims 50 empirical studies demonstrate the Maharishi Effect. The site also claims this research is of the highest quality. A cursory examination of these studies reveals that TM University faculty and students have written almost all of them, and the vast majority have found a home in TM owned publications. One doesn't need a complicated analysis to figure out these studies are worthless; one only needs to look at Fairfield crime statistics above.
TM’S BENEFITS ARE NOT UNIQUE TO TM
TM claims it produces unique benefits; it doesn’t. The Relaxation Response developed over forty years ago by Harvard Professor, Herbert Benson, produces an identical set of physiological changes as TM. Benson should know; he did the original research on TM.
By the year 2000, Dr. Benson’s book, The Relaxation Response, had sold four million copies, topped the New York Times bestseller list, and was translated into thirteen languages. Dr. Benson is regarded as a pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine and founded the Benson Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. The Institute works closely with the Boston Red Sox’s Home Base Foundation.
The relaxation response is a critical component of the services Homebase provides, free of charge, to over 23,000 veterans suffering from PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury. Dr. Benson and his collogues have published over a hundred studies on the relaxation response in top medical journals. Last year, to support this work, the Wounded Warrior’s Foundation gave Massachusetts’s General a $67mm grant, the second largest in the hospital’s history.
BREAKTHROUGH RESEARCH OR JUST PLAIN LIES?
In his recent book, Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation, Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, writes that he wants “to talk in some detail about some of the truly breakthrough research documenting the unique and profound benefits TM has on health and stress.” [Emphasis A. Siegel.]1
Roth’s “breakthrough” refers to a study led by Dr. Robert Schneider, Dean of the College of Maharishi Consciousness-Based Health Care at Maharishi University of Management: “Stress reduction in the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease: randomized, controlled trial of transcendental meditation and health education in blacks.”2
Regarding the study, Schneider said, "These findings are the strongest documented effects yet produced by a mind-body intervention on cardiovascular disease. The effect is as large as, or larger than major categories of drug treatment for cardiovascular disease."3
Why then, on June 27, 2011, only 12 minutes before Dr. Schneider’s article was to publish in the Archives of Internal Medicine, did the editor pull it?
Larry Husten, PhD, a frequent writer for Forbes, the editor of cardiology news for CardioExchange (published by the New England Journal of Medicine), and the editorial director of WebMD, looked into the matter and said that those promoting the research were "clearly guilty of gross scientific exaggeration and misstatement." Further referencing an independent analysis of Schneider's study by Sanjay Kaul, MD, a cardiologist and expert in clinical trials, Husten concluded:
A trial with barely 200 patients cannot be expected to provide broad answers about the health benefits of a novel intervention. As Kaul and others have stated on many other occasions, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is quite clear that the evidence in this trial is not extraordinary, at least in any positive sense.”4
Moreover, even though no studies had compared the effects of meditation to that of statins, the most widely used pharmacological treatment for elevated cholesterol, Schneider told WebMD, “What this is saying is that mind-body interventions can have an effect as big as conventional medications, such as statins.”5
And, although the study was limited to an exclusively African-American population with heart disease, Schneider generalized his study, stating, “This study builds on previous research findings showing that the Transcendental Meditation program reduces high blood pressure, high cholesterol, insulin resistance, psychological stress, and atherosclerosis, and takes it to the next step—lower rates of death, heart attack, and stroke.”6
The following statement appeared on another TM website (tmhome.com): To see the long-term effects of TM’s ability to lower blood pressure, we studied a group of patients with heart disease. Half of them learned TM and half of them served as the control group. We followed them for five years. Those doing TM had a 48% lower rate of heart attack, stroke and death than men and women with similar physical conditions. [Emphasis A. Siegel.]7
If that statement were valid, other medical researchers would have eagerly lined up to replicate the study. Husten offered why that was not the case: [T]he results are at best hypothesis generating and tell us nothing about the actual value of TM. Only about 200 people were randomized in the study—most studies with hard clinical endpoints require thousands of patients. And a cursory examination of the actual paper raises all sorts of red flags…8
But my biggest concern is with the analysis of the primary endpoint, which was the composite of all-cause mortality, MI [myocardial infarction] heart attack, or stroke. This occurred in 20 patients in the TM group compared with 31 patients in the control group, a difference that the authors claim achieved significance (p=0.03) after adjusting for differences in the age, sex, and use of lipid-lowering drugs between the groups. However, there was no significant difference between the groups in any of these factors. Even worse, there were very significant differences in the amount of education (11.3 years in the TM group versus 9.9 years in the control group, p=0.003) and the CES-D clinical depression scale (13.8 versus 17.7) [for which the authors did not make an adjustment, although in both cases the imbalance would appear to favor the TM group]. When these baseline differences were included in a secondary analysis, the result was no longer significant (p=0.06). In other words, to use the old cliché, they tortured the data until they made it talk.9
David Lynch Foundation’s CEO, Bob Roth, also misquoted a study by the American Heart Association (AHA):
In 2013, the American Heart Association looked at years of research on TM and concluded in its journal Hypertension that TM is the only meditation technique shown to lower blood pressure. [Emphasis A. Siegel.]10
The truth came from Robert D. Brook, MD, of the University of Michigan, who chaired the panel of 12 scientists who wrote the study. They concluded:
Numerous alternative approaches for lowering BP have been evaluated during the past few decades. The strongest evidence supports the effectiveness of using aerobic and/or dynamic resistance exercise for the adjuvant treatment of high BP. Biofeedback techniques, isometric handgrip, and device-guided breathing methods are also likely effective treatments.11
Meditation isn’t mentioned as having a positive effect on hypertension. The authors concluded that more (and better) studies were needed to determine what, if any, impact TM had on hypertension.
The overall evidence supports that TM modestly lowers BP, although it is not clear whether it is truly superior to other meditation techniques in terms of BP lowering because there are few head-to-head studies. [Emphasis A. Siegel]12
The AHA study gave TM a mediocre classification – Level B, Class 2B – a rating reserved for the treatment modalities whose usefulness and efficacy was not well established.
Another assessment of Dr. Schneider’s study appears in a US News article in which Gregg Fonarow, MD, the Director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center in Los Angeles, said that even though the findings were statistically significant, the study was too small to be conclusive. "In addition, since this study was conducted at a single center and the primary [change in heart attack, stroke, and death] was not statistically significant without adjustment for other factors, more studies and replication of these findings are needed."13
In a Health Day News article, Schneider revealed, “One of the reasons we did the study is because insurance and Medicare call for citing evidence for what's to be reimbursed."14
"For true believers like Schneider," Husten surmised, "Fighting heart disease is important only insofar as it can be employed to further the interests of TM. Scientific standards and medical progress are unimportant in the larger scheme of promoting TM."15
When the TM organization exaggerates the findings from their internal research and mischaracterizes research by other scientists, they pose a real danger to the public.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Bob Roth, Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2018), p. 81.
[2] Bob Roth, Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2018), pp. 82–84.
[3] Husten, Larry. “New Concerns Raised About Withdrawn Archives Meditation Paper.” Cardio Brief, June 28, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.cardiobrief.org/2011/06/28/new-concerns-raised-about-withdrawn-archives-meditation-paper /
[4] Husten, Larry. “Yet Another Look At The Transcendental Meditation Paper,” Cardio Brief, November 25, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.cardiobrief.org/2012/11/25/yet-another-look-at-the-transcendental-meditation-paper
[5] Husten, Larry, “Yet Another Look At The Transcendental Meditation Paper.” Cardio Brief, November 25, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.cardiobrief.org/2012/11/25/yet-another-look-at-the-transcendental-meditation-paper
[6] Husten, Larry. “New Concerns Raised About Withdrawn Archives Meditation Paper.” Cardio Brief, June 28, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.cardiobrief.org/2011/06/28/new-concerns-raised-about-withdrawn-archives-meditation-paper/
[7] “Dr. Robert Schneider explains the new approach to tackling heart disease.” Transcendental Meditation News & More, 14 June 2017, https://tmhome.com/benefits/dr-robert-schneider-md-heart-health-transcendental-meditation/
[8] Husten, Larry. “New Concerns Raised About Withdrawn Archives Meditation Paper.” Cardio Brief, June 28, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.cardiobrief.org/2011/06/28/new-concerns-raised-about-withdrawn-archives-meditation-paper
[9] Husten, Larry. “New Concerns Raised About Withdrawn Archives Meditation Paper,” Cardio Brief, June 28, 2011. Retrieved from http://cardiobrief.org/2011/06/28/new-concerns-raised-about- withdrawn-archives-meditation-paper/
[10] Bob Roth, Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2018), p. 84.
[11] Robert D. Brook et al., “Beyond Medications and Diet: Alternative Approaches to Lowering Blood Pressure,” Hypertension, 61 (May 2013), pp. 1360–1383. See http://hyper.ahajournals.org/content/61/6/1360
[12] Robert D. Brook et al., “Beyond Medications and Diet: Alternative Approaches to Lowering Blood Pressure,” Hypertension, 61 (May 2013), pp. 1360–1383. See http://hyper.ahajournals.org/content/61/6/1360
[13] “Meditation Might Cut Risk of Heart Attack, Stoke in Blacks,” Received from https://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/11/13/meditation-might-cut risk-of-heart-attack-stroke-in-blacks
[14] Husten, Larry. “Yet Another Look At The Transcendental Meditation Paper,” Cardio Brief, November 25, 2012. Retrieved from http://cardiobrief.org/2012/11/25/yet-another-look-at-the- Transcendental-Meditation Paper