Doctor Edel Maex and Doctor David Dewulf, both colleague-doctors, were on television yesterday evening as experts in the programs Terzake and Panoramas by the Belgian television canal Canvas. Yesterday evening, the Belgian television programs Panorama and Terzake spent an episode on 'mindfulness'. The reason for these episodes was that an undercover reporter visited fake therapists without decent education in mindfulness.
Dr. Edel Maex is a pioneer in Mindfulness in Belgium
Dr. Edel Maex already started looking for the start-up of mindfulness in the nineties by following a course by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness in the United States. He wrote the first Flemish book regarding mindfulness, and now is rightfully annoyed by the many unprofessional imitations of mindfulness which are started by many would-be amateurs without any medical or psychological education.
Dr. David Dewulf followed several years later with his Mindfulness courses
Dr. David Dewulf was the next expert on the Flemish market offering qualitative training in mindfulness. He, too, wrote several books on the topic of mindfulness.
Panorama and Terzake on Mindfulness
Panorama sparked discussions with its undercover interview where a fake patient visited one out of many fake mindfulness professionals. Of course, both doctors, Edel Maex, MD, and David Dewulf, MD, stated that mindfulness, just like other types of psychotherapy, is to be taught only by professionals with a university degree in medicine or psychology.
Mindfulness is a good anti-worrying method
Because mindfulness teaches you to calm down your thoughts and to focus on the present, it is a very good type of stress reducing meditation with positive clinical results. As many people do not manage to follow and keep up with the fully structured mindfulness program, we have in 15 Minutes 4 Me decided to develop a self-help program which integrates some of the positive elements and exercises from mindfulness into a broader therapeutic self-help program. There, mindfulness is combined with techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy, solution focused therapy, and several best practices from other therapy methods. The online self-help program therefore is not a traditional mindfulness program, but rather a program which integrates best practices with other solution strategies.
Online self-test to see if mindfulness or self-help can help you
Would you like to know if you suffer from a type of stress where the online self-help program or a mindfulness course could help? Then fill out our free online self-test here now.
Paul Koeck, MD
