This under-utilized healing technique helps patients’ mental and physical health

What is an essential, sometimes overlooked, healing technique that helps babies thrive, comforts and connects adults, and promotes mental and physical well-being?

It’s human touch, and an article detailing a review of 75 studies and a meta-analysis of 137 more published April 8, 2024 in Nature Human Behavior quantifies its significance. Among the findings were:

• Touch can lessen pain and feelings of fatigue, depression and anxiety. To a moderate extent, touch also can control levels of cortisol (a hormone associated with stress), aid blood pressure, mobility and have psychological affect.
• People with mental health issues benefit more from touch than people without mental health issues.
• Newborns benefit more from being touched by a parent (most studies looked only at touch by the mother) than by an unfamiliar person. Touch helps babies gain weight.
• No difference was detected in adults between touched by a familiar person and an unfamiliar one (health professionals).
• In adults, more times of sustained touch increase both mental and physical benefits.

Caryn Thornton, a licensed social worker who works as a case manager in outpatient behavioral health at Cape Cod Hospital, knows the value of touch.

“It’s a basic human need. I will say touch, in general, is just so important,” she said.

Thornton worked as a licensed massage therapist for 18 years, and still sees a few clients. She said touch improves her clients’ health.

“I know I’m helping them,” she said.

Absence of Touch

As an example of touch’s importance, Thornton recalled learning of a decades-old experiment that compared babies raised by their mothers with those from whom touch and most human contact was withheld – something abhorrent by modern ethics. This research was likely the work performed in the 1940s by Rene Spitz, as described in a brief history by McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Children isolated in an orphanage didn’t develop normally, with most unable to speak or walk in their second and third years. Other children were raised in a prison nursery, but received regular attention from their incarcerated mothers. They were also able to interact with each other and prison staff. These children developed normally.

“I think there’s so many levels to touch,” Thornton said, including comfort in “knowing this person is going to take care of me.”

Thornton said hugging and other forms of social touching take a prominent part in some cultures, but less so in others, including American culture.

Some other benefits of touch found in the study published recently in Nature Human Behavior were:

• Women’s levels of cortisol decrease with touch more than men (women made up about 83 percent of the study groups examined).
• Touching the head has more health benefits than touching the arm or torso.
• Systolic blood pressure benefits from touch seem to increase with age.
• Health benefits of touch vary with geographic locale. For example, American and European study groups showed less health benefit for adults from touch than South American study groups.
• A comparison of touch from a person vs. a robot or object in adults found similar physical health results for both, but greater mental health benefits for human touch.

Touch in Modern Healthcare

Traditional Western medicine underutilizes touch, unlike Eastern medicine and other alternative approaches, which are all “based around touch,” Thornton said. This may be partially due to the brevity of medical appointments and difficulties in getting some therapies covered by insurance, she added.

“(Touch is) very powerful and we don’t do it enough,” she said.

Many integrative therapies, also called alternative or complementary medicine, do emphasize touch and are offered at several Cape Cod Healthcare facilities. Options include therapeutic touch, reflexology and Reiki at Falmouth Hospital; pet therapy, Reiki and more through the VNA of Cape Cod; and, for Cape cancer patients who are undergoing or recovering from treatment, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic and several other therapies are available free or subsidized from Cape Wellness Collaborative.