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A study of health insurance statistics on over 2,000 people practicing the Transcendental Meditation programme over a 5-year period found that the Transcendental Meditation meditators consistently had less than half the hospitalization than did other groups with comparable age, gender, profession, and insurance terms. The difference between the Transcendental Meditation and non-Transcendental Meditation groups increased in older-age brackets. In addition, the Transcendental Meditation meditators had fewer incidents of illness in 17 medical treatment categories, including 87% less hospitalization for heart disease and 55% less for cancer.

Reference I: Medical care utilisation and the Transcendental Meditation programme, Psychosomatic Medicine 49: 493­507, 1987. Reference II: Reduced health care utilisation in Transcendental Meditation practitioners, presented at the conference of the Society for Behavioral Medicine, Washington, D.C., March 22, 1987. Index of charts