Mindfulness Group Medical Visits for Chronic Low Back Pain (Morone et al., 2026)
Chronic low back pain is one of the most common reasons adults seek care from a primary care clinician, and current treatments often fall short. Mindfulness practice has been linked to better pain outcomes, yet it rarely reaches patients through routine care. A pragmatic randomized trial in JAMA Internal Medicine asked whether building mindfulness into the primary care visit itself could change that.
Natalia Morone and colleagues randomly assigned 451 adults with chronic low back pain to either an eight-week mindfulness group medical visit program or usual care. Participants were recruited from general internal medicine and family medicine clinics in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Their average age was 52, about 70% were women, and all reported a moderate level of pain interfering with daily life at the start. The program was delivered by telehealth as part of primary care, and the trial, known as OPTIMUM, ran from 2021 to 2024.
The main outcome was change on the PEG scale, a short measure of pain intensity, enjoyment of life and general activity, between the start of the study and six months. Participants were also assessed at eight weeks and at twelve months.
At six months, scores in the mindfulness group had improved by 1.21 points, compared with 0.59 points in the usual care group. The difference of 0.62 points was statistically significant. The gap was larger right after the program, at 0.89 points at week 8, and it was still present at twelve months, at 0.74 points. Pain interference and intensity therefore appeared to stay lower in the mindfulness group for a full year.
Importantly, the improvements did not reach the one-point difference the researchers had set in advance as the smallest change that would count as clinically meaningful. People in both groups improved, and the added benefit of the mindfulness program was real but modest.
Because the comparison was against usual care rather than another active treatment, the trial cannot say whether mindfulness works better than other group-based approaches, or how much of the benefit comes from the group format and extra contact with clinicians. The abstract does not describe the participants’ backgrounds beyond the clinic settings, so how well the findings apply to other populations remains to be seen.
The authors describe the program as accessible, scalable and well suited to primary care, and as a possible non-drug option for people living with persistent back pain. Future studies will need to clarify which patients benefit most, and whether changes to the program can lift the effect closer to the threshold for clinical importance. For readers interested in how mindfulness is applied to pain more broadly, see our guide to mindfulness-based pain management.
Reference and link: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2026.2186
