Rheumatoid Arthritis Meditation

The study being proposed is if meditation has an effect on rheumatoid arthritis. The motivation for this study that is being proposed is due to arthritis as a common diagnosis for a type of pain people have in their body. When pain is occurring, people tend to focus on the location of the pain, but, if meditation was done, maybe the pain would go away. This study is worth doing because this could change the treatment of arthritis for people. Meditation is free and has no specific time of day to do it. This proposal relates to the previous studies read due to having the meditation aspect of it. Also, related to another study, this has to do with a physical and mental mindset of pain tolerance. This study would build on the knowledge gained …show more content…
This generation tends to be the one where they start to notice arthritis beginning or have it progressing in various parts of the body. There should be 300 participants all from the same state, but all different ethnicities. Ethnicity includes African American, Asian, Caucasian, Latino and Native American. Participants would not be excluded unless they didn’t fall into the category of the ethnicities or did not have arthritis. Limitations of these choices that would occur would be too big of an age range. Another limitation within the age range would be the severities of the arthritis and the pain. As a part of this study, participants will be taking a survey rating how severe their arthritis pain is on a daily basis. Another portion on the survey would be writing where the specific part of the body of arthritis is present and if they were involved in any activities when they were younger such as sports. This way, the participants can be randomly assigned between those with one portion of the body and those with multiple areas of the body having arthritis. This will be a pretest and a post test experiment so when participants are completed with the experiment, they will then take the posttest survey of their pain levels. An aspect of this pre/post test as well is fMRI imaging will take place which is a brain scan of brain activity going on when there is pain and when there is not pain plus utilizing meditation. After the pretest, some participants will meditate by focusing on their breathing for ten minutes whenever the pain appears at home and the other participants will massage their pain area with no meditation. They are required to fill out a self-survey in how much pain they are in before meditating as well as after to see if there has been