This fall, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a grant of nearly $8 million to Maharishi University of Management’s College of Maharishi Vedic Medicine to establish the first research center in the country specializing in natural preventive medicine for minorities. This Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention was inaugurated in Fairfield, Iowa, on October 11, 1999.

Enlightenment magazine spoke with Robert Schneider, M.D., Dean of the College of Maharishi Vedic Medicine and Director of the Center about the importance of this new institution.

Enlightenment: This $8 million grant will fund many new studies documenting the benefits of Maharishi Vedic Medicine on the health and well-being of individuals and society. All the research you’ve worked on for the last 15 years has laid the foundation for this important achievement. Take us back to the very beginning— how did all this start?

Dr. Schneider: Dr. Skip Alexander and I both arrived at Maharishi University of Management in 1984. We were looking forward to contributing to the expanding body of research on the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation technique begun in the early 1970’s by Dr. Keith Wallace and other prominent scientists. Since my medical training was in preventive medicine and hypertension, and Skip’s was in psychology as it applied to health and other major social problems, we decided together to focus on the effects of the TM technique on hyper-tension.

Enlightenment: What were the results of your first study?

Dr. Schneider: The Retirement Research Foundation awarded us $235,000 to study the effects of TM on hypertension in older African Americans. In 122 men and women in Oak-land, California, between the ages of 55 and 85, we found that TM was more effective in reducing high blood pressure than other stress reduction approaches and as effective as medication on average.

In 1990, we presented the results of this first randomized, controlled study to the National Institutes of Health. We wanted to expand the study, with a larger group and more advanced measurements. We were successful because we proposed a unique solution to a major health care dilemma in a high risk, underserved population, our pilot data was strong, and we had a good collaboration between our team at Maharishi University of Management and the West Oakland Health Center, led by Frank Staggers, M.D.

Enlightenment: Tell us about some of your studies on the benefits of the TM technique and hypertension since then.

Dr. Schneider: There are three levels of prevention for cardiovascular disease. Our first studies had focused on secondary prevention, lowering high blood pressure. But we wondered, if this is good for people who are already sick, what about the millions of people who are not yet sick, but are at risk for getting hypertension? So we collaborated with Dr. Clarence Grimm and his colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee on an NIH-funded study on primary prevention.

In the area of tertiary prevention, which deals with individuals who already have serious heart problems, we looked at the death records of the elderly African Americans in the original Oakland study and found there was a lower death rate from heart attacks and strokes among those participants practicing the TM technique compared to controls. Using that data, we conducted a study in Milwaukee and Los Angeles on people at high risk for death from heart disease.

Enlightenment: There were some other interesting findings about cancer from your earlier research. Are you doing a study about that?

Dr. Schneider: While we were looking at death from heart disease, we were also looking at death from other diseases. We found that over eight years’ time, the death rate from cancer among people in our earlier studies was about 50 percent less than the control groups. To follow up that finding in people who already have cancer, a study started this fall in Chicago with our collaborator Dr. Jeremy Fields and his colleagues.

Enlightenment: One of your post-doctoral fellows worked on an interesting pilot study. Did she discover something interesting?

Dr. Schneider: Yes, this is very exciting. She measured the carotid artery in the neck and found that there was a reversal of atherosclerosis, the narrowing of the artery, with the practice of the TM program. This artery is a mirror of the arteries in the heart and body, generally. This is the first time, that we are aware, that researchers have shown a reversal of atherosclerosis with any stress reduction approach. That larger study began this summer with our collaborator Hector Myers, Ph.D. and others at the Charles Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Enlightenment: Now you have received a prestigious $8 million grant to establish a Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention. Tell us about the Center and why the College of Maharishi Vedic Medicine was chosen from among the many outstanding candidates.

Dr. Schneider: The National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine is a branch of the NIH. They wanted to create miniature NIHs, if you will, centers of excellence for scientific research in complimentary and alternative medicine around the country.

They were looking for world-class centers of expertise in natural medicine. Our research was well known to the NIH-NCCAM and we had a long track record of success. We had demonstrated we could do these types of projects; we had interventions that worked, knew how to train people and how to organize and develop new studies. About 40 other institutions, including many of the major medical schools and medical centers around the country, applied for this grant.

The Center will be based here in Fairfield, and we’ll work in collaboration with our colleagues in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Enlightenment: This is a very exciting development for the College of Maharishi Vedic Medicine. What work will the Center focus on first?

Dr. Schneider: We have three major research projects going on. One is in the area of women’s heart health, especially in older African American women who are particularly at risk. That study is going on in Atlanta at the Morehouse Medical Center.

A second project is focusing on Maharishi Amrit Kalash as an antioxidant in the treatment of heart disease; comparing it to conventional antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine in Los Angeles.

Our third study looks at physiological and psychological mechanisms by which TM could prevent heart disease. We have shown that TM can reduce risk factors and death due to heart disease. But the next question is: How does it do that? How does the nervous system mediate between consciousness and physiology? That study is taking place in Los Angeles at Drew and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Enlightenment: What do you see as the Center’s most important contribution to the future of health care?

Dr. Schneider: With the whole US medical community moving towards non-drug treatment of hypertension and the prevention of cardiovascular disease and other diseases such as cancer, we’ve documented how the TM program can reduce the rate of heart disease and strokes and other serious disorders without harmful side effects, and with lower long-term costs. And 30 years of research have shown that there are improvements in quality of life that you don’t see with other treatments, such as better psychological health and a higher quality of life.

Our hope for the Center is, that by studying the full range of Maharishi Vedic Medicine programs, we can identify effective and economical prevention- oriented approaches to chronic disease, and translate our findings into widespread clinical implementation in national health care policy. The goal of our Center is to create a disease-free society.

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