Can mindfulness boost global health? UC Berkeley’s Doug Oman says yes
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Dr. Doug Oman, an adjunct professor of community health sciences at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, has published a new paradigm for expanding the practice of meditation, mindfulness, and other contemplative practices to improve public health.
In the March 2025 issue of Mindfulness, Oman presents his framework, Public Health Implementation of Mindfulness (PHIOMM). The article is featured in the journal’s special issue on mindfulness as a means of boosting health around the world.
Oman’s article offers practical tools for integrating mindfulness/meditation interventions into public health. Oman called it the first step-by-step implementation framework that can be used by community organizations, religious organizations, municipalities, and other public entities. He includes current mindfulness-based programs for stress reduction, including Buddhist and non-Buddhist contemplative practices.
“I would like to see people be supported to integrate mindfulness and meditation into their lives, as they do exercise and diet,” Oman said in an interview. “Just as we design urban areas with sidewalks, and whatever, to make exercising easier, one could work to make meditation easier.”
“It might be integrated into city health departments. There is some of that right now—places to meditate in airports and hospitals—but there’s room for more and better support for meditative practices.”
Oman calls for sensitivity to cultural, religious, and political differences, as well as safety concerns. He also notes the favorable impact meditation and mindfulness practices can have on depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, addiction, pain and other medical conditions.
He acknowledges this would be a big societal change.
“Big changes generally require lots of little changes that help them along the way,” he said. “But such culturally and religiously inclusive support for meditation might be sort of a medium-sized change that could eventually help big changes happen.”
Oman’s PHIOMM framework also calls for consideration of improvements to social environments, such as workplaces, to reduce fragmentation of attention, and enhance their supportiveness of attentional health. His framework appeared in a special issue whose featured article, also authored by him, analyzed the overall suitability of mindfulness for integration into public health, finding a substantial basis, and identifying several areas of needed work.