Yoga and pain: A mind-body complex system.

Introduction: The human body's response to pain is indicative of a complex adaptive system. Therapeutic yoga potentially represents a similar complex adaptive system that could interact with the pain response system with unique benefits.

Objectives: To determine the viability of yoga as a therapy for pain and whether pain responses and/or yoga practice should be considered complex adaptive systems.

Global Correlations Between Chronic Inflammation and Violent Incidents: Potential Behavioral Consequences of Inflammatory Illnesses Across Socio-Demographic Levels.

Introduction: This review explores the potential correlation between conditions associated with chronic inflammation and measures of violence across five socioeconomic subgroups. The hypothesis being that since chronic inflammation is associated with increased aggression, an extreme version of which is violence, there should be a correlation between incidents of violence and diseases with one or more inflammatory factors, without an equivalent correlation with the contrast group. An extension of this reasoning would predict a higher correlation among lower socio-demographic index (SDI) populations as a result of fewer resources to prevent either inflammatory disease or violent crime.

Implications for Systemic Approaches to COVID-19: Effect Sizes of Remdesivir, Tocilizumab, Melatonin, Vitamin D3, and Meditation.

Introduction: COVID-19 poses a chronic threat to inflammatory systems, reinforcing the need for efficient anti-inflammatory strategies. The purpose of this review and analysis was to determine the efficacy of various interventions upon the inflammatory markers most affected by COVID-19. The focus was on the markers associated with COVID-19, not the etiology of the virus itself.

Mechanisms of yogic practices in health, aging, and disease.

Mechanisms underlying the modulating effects of yogic cognitive-behavioral practices (eg, meditation, yoga asanas, pranayama breathing, caloric restriction) on human physiology can be classified into 4 transduction pathways: humoral factors, nervous system activity, cell trafficking, and bioelectromagnetism. Here we give examples of these transduction pathways and how, through them, yogic practices might optimize health, delay aging, and ameliorate chronic illness and stress from disability. We also recognize that most studies of these mechanisms remain embedded in a reductionist paradigm, investigating small numbers of elements of only 1 or 2 pathways.

New beginnings: evidence that the meditational regimen can lead to optimization of perception, attention, cognition, and other functions.

A "framework" is presented for understanding empirically confirmed and unconfirmed phenomena in the Indo-Tibetan meditation system, from an integrative perspective, and providing evidence that certain meditative practices enable meditators to realize the innate human potential to perceive light "at the limits imposed by quantum mechanics," on the level of individual photons. This is part of a larger Buddhist agenda to meditatitively develop perceptual/attentional capacities to achieve penetrating insight into the nature of phenomena. Such capacities may also allow advanced meditators to perceive changes in natural scenes that are "hidden" from persons with "normal" attentional capacities, according to research on "change blindness," and to enhance their visual system functioning akin to high-speed and time-lapse photography, in toto allowing for the perception, as well as sophisticated understanding, of the "moment to moment change or impermanence" universally characteristic of the phenomenal world but normally outside untrained attention and perception according to Buddhist doctrine.

From the global to the local: possible pathways for the transduction of Indo-Sino-Tibetan cognitive-behavioral practices into site-specific, tissue-regenerative effects.

While skepticism regarding the possibilities for a productive meeting (metaphorically or actual) between Western medicine and biology and older healing and health practices of traditional cultures may be prevalent, there are many theoretical points of meeting and much experimental data to suggest that cognitive-behavioral practices (C-Bp) of the latter may induce testable and reproducible phenomena for the former. Such modulation or modification of tissue regeneration by C-Bp presumably must work through systemic signaling of some kind. Several possible mechanisms for such signaling are recognized and will be reviewed here: humoral, neurological, cell trafficking, and bioelectromagnetic/energy mediated.

Longevity: potential life span and health span enhancement through practice of the basic yoga meditation regimen.

This chapter briefly reviews recent psychological, physiological, molecular biological, and anthropological research which has important implications, both direct and indirect, for the recognition and understanding of the potential life span and health span enhancing effects of the basic yoga meditational regimen. This regimen consists of meditation, yogic breath control practices, physical exercises (of both a postural- and movement-based, including aerobic nature), and dietary practices. While each of these component categories exhibit variations in different schools, lineages, traditions, and cultures, the focus of this chapter is primarily on basic forms of relaxation meditation and breath control, as well as postural and aerobic physical exercises (e.

Toward a unified field of study: longevity, regeneration, and protection of health through meditation and related practices.

The orientation of this volume and the Longevity and Optimal Health: Integrating Eastern and Western Perspectives conference is that there is abundant evidence in the scientific and medical literatures that the diligent practice of certain yoga-meditational regimens can lead to a spectrum of health enhancements, ranging from modest to profound, and that these can be investigated in a scientifically rigorous fashion. This overview will summarize these possibilities regarding improved human longevity, regeneration, and protection of health and serve to introduce the perspectives of conference participants from all of the traditions represented.