A pilot randomized controlled trial will test the feasibility and acceptability of an online mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program for people with chronic musculoskeletal pain who are on waitlists for multidisciplinary pain clinics in Australia's public healthcare system. Thirty-two participants from two clinics in Sydney will be randomly assigned to either the online MBSR group or usual care. The study will assess feasibility, patient-reported outcomes, adherence to mindfulness practice, and adverse events using validated questionnaires, along with qualitative interviews to explore participants' experiences. Results will guide the design of larger future trials.
Mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than slow breathing alone or a control condition. Pooling data from 5 randomized controlled trials with 245 healthy, pain-free, meditation-naïve adults, noxious heat was applied to the right calf to test whether changes in respiration and state anxiety mediate pain relief. Mindfulness meditation produced significantly greater analgesia compared with sham-mindfulness meditation (slow breathing) and a book-listening control. Slower respiration rate partially mediated analgesia for both mindfulness and sham-mindfulness meditation relative to controls. Both techniques lowered anxiety, but these reductions did not mediate pain relief. The findings demonstrate that mindfulness meditation outperforms slow breathing alone for reducing pain and highlight slower breathing's role in directly modulating acute pain.