Do Telehealth Mindfulness-Based Interventions Relieve Chronic Pain?

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are effective treatments for patients with chronic pain (NEJM JW Gen Med May 1 2016 and JAMA 2016; 315:1240), but they are not available widely. In this randomized trial from U.S. Veterans Affairs, researchers assessed whether two “scalable, relatively low-resource” 8-week telehealth MBIs improved pain compared with usual care in ≈800 participants (median age, 55; 48% women). The group-MBI arm consisted of small-group telehealth sessions in which participants viewed prerecorded videos and participated in facilitated discussions. In the self-paced-MBI arm, participants watched the same videos during asynchronous weekly sessions and had 3 phone calls with a facilitator. The usual-care group did not recei…