i fully support mindfulness and meditation as tools with real potential benefit, but the literature on clinical effectiveness leaves a lot to be desired. see a good overview of this issue here by one of the leaders in mindfulness research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26436311
overall, the body of literature on therapeutic benefits of mindfulness to date does not refute the hypothesis that mindfulness is "pseudoscience" (though it doesn't confirm this hypothesis either). there has been a surge in publications related to therapeutic applications of mindfulness in recent years, and nearly all of them are small, single-center, uncontrolled studies. as far as i know, there has only been one large, well designed randomized controlled clinical study of mindfulness based interventions (don't recall the paper, but it is in the grossman et al 2003 meta analysis), but that study did not include a positive control. a more recent study (similar in size and design, but including a positive control), failed to show a therapeutic benefit for mindfulness based intervention vs the control (study is jmg williams et al 2014 in journal of consulting and clinical psychiatry). so there are two high quality studies on clinical benefits of mindfulness interventions, one is positive and one is not
with respect to the less well designed (and more numerous) recently published clinical studies of mindfulness, the results are almost always positive. with small poorly controlled studies, this is always a red flag. one of the markers of "science" vs "pseudoscience" is the definition of the limitations of an intervention. if something seems too good to be true, it probably is
dont mean to rant or be a wet blanket. i personally believe mindfulness has great clinical potential, but to convince the medical community (and payers) of this, the field needs to focus on quality vs quantity of evidence
The study literally says: "MBCT provided significant protection against relapse for participants with increased vulnerability due to history of childhood trauma, but showed no significant advantage in comparison to an active control treatment and usual care over the whole group of patients with recurrent depression."
Which means: in some cases MBCT is SIGNIFICANTLYBETTER than the compared treatments and overall it is ASGOODAS the compared treatments (i.e. cognitive psychological education (CPE) and treatment as usual (TAU)).
Now, looking back at your post, you said "failed to show a therapeutic benefit" which is strange, because the mentioned study shows that the therapeutic benefit is about the same and sometimes it is even better compared to CPE and TAU. So why would you say that MBCT does not show therapeutic benefit if it has the same results as the other (best?) known treatment methods?
PS: I would really like to turn your biased question around: Do you know of any treatment method which is better than MBCT?
It showed a slight benefit in a small particular subgroup for one of the things they checked (only those with above median severity benefited a bit more).
For what is worth, the fact that any treatment has roughly the same effects (with some being slightly more or less effective in some subgroups in smallish samples) shows that the effects of all those treatments are likely placebo, or at minimum that there is nothing special about meditation (e.g. you can get the same benefit from talking to someone/listen to an audiobook or whatever).
the full context of the quote you used from my comment is that mbct "failed to show a significant benefit vs the control". Your shortened quotation misses that very important context. The control exists to account for all the other confounding factors, besides mindfulness, involved in mbct. When you control for those, and mindfulness is the only variable that differs between active arm and control arm, there is no significant benefit to mindfulness. So one can reasonably conclude that other things like being in a therapy group, learning about depression, etc were driving the benefit, not mindfulness
Regarding the subgroup finding: as far as I know, the study was not designed or powered to rigorously measure the impact of the interventions on this subgroup. If they did another good study looking just at this subgroup and the results were positive, that's a different thing. The first thing investigators do when a study fails the primary endpoint is mine for subsets of the data that show a positive result. That doesn't make the result meaningless, but should invite skepticism
Reproducibility is a huge problem in scientific research. These are not determinate systems, and a huge number of things can bias a result, intentionally or otherwise. Scientific publications, even in good journals, need to be viewed with an appropriate amount of skepticism
According to NICE, one of the leading agencies on cost effectiveness and clinical guidelines, MBCT is only recommended for prevention of relapse in patients who have had three or more episodes of depression. CBT and augmenting antidepressants work just as well. Funny thing about depression studies is most interventions, pill or psychotherapy (or even placebo sometimes) tend to have similar levels of effect
overall, the body of literature on therapeutic benefits of mindfulness to date does not refute the hypothesis that mindfulness is "pseudoscience" (though it doesn't confirm this hypothesis either). there has been a surge in publications related to therapeutic applications of mindfulness in recent years, and nearly all of them are small, single-center, uncontrolled studies. as far as i know, there has only been one large, well designed randomized controlled clinical study of mindfulness based interventions (don't recall the paper, but it is in the grossman et al 2003 meta analysis), but that study did not include a positive control. a more recent study (similar in size and design, but including a positive control), failed to show a therapeutic benefit for mindfulness based intervention vs the control (study is jmg williams et al 2014 in journal of consulting and clinical psychiatry). so there are two high quality studies on clinical benefits of mindfulness interventions, one is positive and one is not
with respect to the less well designed (and more numerous) recently published clinical studies of mindfulness, the results are almost always positive. with small poorly controlled studies, this is always a red flag. one of the markers of "science" vs "pseudoscience" is the definition of the limitations of an intervention. if something seems too good to be true, it probably is
dont mean to rant or be a wet blanket. i personally believe mindfulness has great clinical potential, but to convince the medical community (and payers) of this, the field needs to focus on quality vs quantity of evidence