Joseph Loizzo is a psychiatrist and a Ph.D in religious studies with a focus on Buddhism. In this lecture, he discusses meditation and its relation to health practice and research. He asks why meditation and other Indic practices are not recognized as viable treatment options by the health sciences despite clear evidence of their effectiveness. He suggests that Western medicine holds strongly to a materialistic paradigm and actively disregards practices such as meditation or psychotherapy as mystical and unscientific. He offers suggestions on how the differences in paradigms between contemplative traditions and science may be overcome and suggests that the Buddhist tradition, with its evolutionary view of the human condition and emphasis on rationality and causality, can act as an acceptable and valuable contributor to modern clinical practices. (Zach Rowinski 2004-05-27)