Alternative Medicine

In the area of alternative medicine, Community Health Center provides Mindfulness-based stressed reduction, modeled after the nationally acclaimed Stress Reduction Clinic founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester in 1979.

The CHC’s SRP is an educational course. It is not a medical treatment or mental health therapy. The group class meets once a week for 8 weeks. Each class is two hours long.

Patients are offered an intensive training in a variety of mindfulness meditation techniques. These techniques include: the body scan, breathing meditation, walking meditation, and gentle stretching.

In addition to weekly classes, patients are given audiocassettes or CDs to use for home meditation practice of approximately 30 minutes per day.

Class activities are designed to enhance awareness of one’s body and mind, to bring greater clarity to interpersonal communication, and to replace automatic reactions to stressful situations with consciously chosen responses.

Class time is divided between practicing meditation techniques, and discussing how mindfulness, or moment-to-moment awareness, can reduce stress, and help patients cope more effectively with chronic illness and physical and emotional pain.

Research on mindfulness-based stress reduction has shown it to be effective for decreasing symptoms and improving quality of life among patients with a wide variety of illnesses, including chronic pain, anxiety, depression, cancer, psoriasis, fibromyalgia, and HIV infection.

Preliminary studies with MBSR program has also demonstrated positive changes in brain electrical activity that correspond to improved mood, and positive changes in immune response among program participants.

There are currently approximately 200 MBSR programs in North America
modeled on the UMASS Stress Reduction Clinic. Just a few of these are offered to inner-city or minority patients or taught in Spanish or other languages.

Beth Roth, MSN, the CHC SRP instructor, is a Nurse Practitioner with a Master’s
Degree from the Yale School of Nursing. She has been practicing meditation for nearly 20 years, and teaching MBSR since 1993. She is bilingual, and teaches MBSR in Spanish and English.