overall, the body of literature on therapeutic benefits of mindfulness to date does not refute the hypothesis that mindfulness is "pseudoscience" (though it doesn't confirm this hypothesis either). there has been a surge in publications related to therapeutic applications of mindfulness in recent years, and nearly all of them are small, single-center, uncontrolled studies. as far as i know, there has only been one large, well designed randomized controlled clinical study of mindfulness based interventions (don't recall the paper, but it is in the grossman et al 2003 meta analysis), but that study did not include a positive control. a more recent study (similar in size and design, but including a positive control), failed to show a therapeutic benefit for mindfulness based intervention vs the control (study is jmg williams et al 2014 in journal of consulting and clinical psychiatry). so there are two high quality studies on clinical benefits of mindfulness interventions, one is positive and one is not
with respect to the less well designed (and more numerous) recently published clinical studies of mindfulness, the results are almost always positive. with small poorly controlled studies, this is always a red flag. one of the markers of "science" vs "pseudoscience" is the definition of the limitations of an intervention. if something seems too good to be true, it probably is
dont mean to rant or be a wet blanket. i personally believe mindfulness has great clinical potential, but to convince the medical community (and payers) of this, the field needs to focus on quality vs quantity of evidence