By KATHY SYKES

Last updated at 00:08 18 March 2008

As a scientist, I have always been cautious about alternative therapies — I would rather put my faith in conventional medicine, which has been put through numerous trials and research, and proven to work through

rigorous experiments.

And save for the occasional massage, I would certainly never spend my own money on alternative treatments. Some

of my fellow scientists have even stronger views and dismiss it all as quackery.

Yet over the past few years, Britain has seen a dramatic uptake in alternative therapies. I'd always thought that the real reason these therapies "worked" for people who used them was simply because they were just very good at making the placebo effect work.

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Meditation: A study has found people who meditate regularly are happier and less anxious

But having spent the past few months examining the scientific facts about hypnotherapy, reflexology and meditation — three of the fastest growing therapies in the UK — I'm beginning to understand their appeal.

Take meditation, for instance. Not so long ago, I would have said sitting around cross-legged for hours, reflecting on goodness knows what, would be a pretty futile exercise.

Yet it's said meditation can help with many things, including depression and anxiety, as well as helping us feel more content and leaving us better able to think.

In search of the truth, I travelled to the foothills of the Himalayas, where I learned basic meditation from a Buddhist monk called Matthieu Ricard.

He has been called the "happiest man in the world" and has been meditating for 30 years. Ricard believes meditation changes the way you experience every moment of your life, reducing anxiety and boosting compassion.

And after meditating with him, I definitely felt calmer and more at ease. In my own life, over the past few years, I'd made a point of sitting down quietly for 20 minutes a day on my sofa, listening to music, simply to have a break.

It suddenly struck me that what I'd been doing wasn't dissimilar to meditation. And while Ricard's views could

sound like mumbo jumbo, his theories are increasingly being given weight by science.

At the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Richard Davidson has carried out a study where he has seen significant changes in brain activity when people meditated.

Those in his study also reported feeling less anxious and happier.

Likewise, Dr Herbert Benson, who works at the Massachusetts General hospital in Boston, has studied a myriad of different types of meditation and their effects on the body, and concludes that they produce a deep form of relaxation which he calls The Relaxation Response.

When I visited him, I was hooked up to several machines which measured my stress levels, including my pulse, the tension in my muscles, my breathing rate, even the sweat on my skin.

I was told to sit quietly for ten minutes, so my pulse rate when resting could be measured. I then had to undertake a simple meditation exercise, during which my pulse and breathing rate actually went below my

normal level at rest.

It was clear that meditating had caused physical responses in my body. Dr Benson believes the regular elicitation of the relaxation response can help with a whole range of medical conditions in which stress plays a role, such as asthma, infertility and diabetes.

Although this link between stress and illness isn't fully understood, scientifically this is not an unreasonable link to make.

At the same hospital, neuroscientist Sara Lazar is also getting some intriguing results looking at meditation's effect on neuroplasticity — which is the ability of the brain to change structure as it learns new tasks.

Neuroplasticity occurs when we learn to juggle or play a musical instrument. In these instances, parts of the brain actually thicken, which shows the brain is, growing new connections.

Lazar has also found the cortex of the brain — which governs thought processes — are thicker in people who meditate regularly compared to non-meditators.

To see if this is actually down to meditation will require more research, but the potential implications are exciting.

For example, in the elderly, the cortex is known to thin and shrink, so meditation might slow down the effects of growing old.

I made similarly exciting findings when I looked into hypnotherapy. It's a therapy I've long considered pretty wacky, but I did unearth some rather compelling work by Professor Irving Kirsch from Hull University.

He used an MRI scanner to monitor the brain when people were told, under hypnosis, to imagine seeing a black and

white picture in colour.

They were also monitored as they did the same thing while not hypnotised. He found that, when hypnotised, the subjects activated the parts of their brain that would be active if they were in fact seeing colour.

But when they were in a normal state, this area was not activated.

But my natural cautiousness about alternative therapies seemed to be well-founded when it came to reflexology.

To heal a range of ailments, practitioners apply pressure to different areas of the feet which are considered by reflexologists to be a mirror image of the body itself.

An anatomist told me the "foot map" used by reflexologists has no anatomical basis.

Professor Leslie Walker from Hull University has found that reflexology helps breast cancer patients relax and so improves their quality of life — but he found no significant differences between the results for reflexology and head massage.

This made me wonder whether there could potentially be benefits from massage and touch, rather than from reflexology per se.

So I looked at what we really know about massage, and found, to my surprise, that the answer is not very much.

By the end of all my explorations, I was left with more questions than answers. But there is no doubt that certain studies in this field are yielding results which made me — and possibly even the most sceptical of individuals — take stock when it comes to the value of alternative therapies.

I'll certainly be adding meditation into my daily routine from now on.

• Alternative Therapies will be shown on BBC2 at 9pm for the next two Mondays.