Present Moment Effects: Pain, Distress, and Cancer

Cancer patients experience distress during their disease that likely will be exacerbated at some point by pain.Poor pain control is common among those with cancer, and the primary medical treatment is the prescription of opioid medications.The purpose here was to investigate the efficacy of a modified eightweek mindfulness-based intervention on the pain-related factors of pain anxiety, pain catastrophizing, symptoms of distress, and fatigue in 57 women diagnosed with breast cancer and consequent pain.As predicted, statistical analyses of pre-post scores revealed significant improvements for pain anxiety and pain catastrophizing following the eight-week intervention.Also, symptoms of distress and fatigue improved significantly pre-to-post in this group of women.These preliminary findings are encouraging, yet they must be viewed with caution until further research is conducted in this area.Hopefully, this line of research eventually will be able to provide options other than narcotics to those in pain.