The Power Of Touch

We human beings are wired for touch. We respond to touch and need it to survive. Our first instinct when we are injured is to put our hand over the affected site and oftentimes to rub it. There is a special magic that occurs when someone else touches us. The brain responds by releasing endorphins that heighten the sensation of touch, then the hair follicles have a muscle that causes the hair shaft to stand up in response to stimuli; we blush, which is increased circulation. These are just some of the automatic response we have to touch but it goes deeper than that because of the nurturing nature of person to person touch. This explains why we respond three fold to therapeutic massage.

If you look at the studies of Jane Goodall with the chimps, you see that they spend a huge portion of the day grooming each other, clumped together in social touching. We too receive psychological benefits from touch. This is one of the reasons that massage has such a deep effect on reducing stress, which is not just muscular but emotional as well. There have been studies that showed that infants who were not picked up and held ended up having severe health problems.

What a shame that as western medicine advances it loses sight of the power of contact and touch. People will never respond as well to therapy that replaces human contact with a machine, but today medicine looks for ways to have the doctor treat more people therefore they hook you up to a machine that stimulates muscle activity so that the doctor can spend time with the people in treatment rooms 2,3 &4. We are too focused on whats expedient for the doctor than what is good for the patient, and we are too caught up in what insurance will pay for rather than what will make us well. Example, you injure yourself and believe you require surgery (probably not getting a second opinion because insurance wouldn’t pay for it) after the deductible and co-pay and the physical therapy and prescriptions and on and on you end up paying $6,000.00 thinking you got off cheap because the total bill was $60,000.00. Think out of the box, surgery is another injury that you end up having to recover from. That same $6,000.00 could have bought you over 100 massage sessions. Therapeutic massage and injury massage can have dramatic effects. Massage therapists are they only medical practitioners that will spend total hands on time with you to aid you in your own healing. If you believe that the body wants to heal itself, that it wants to return to normal; then massage does the primary thing that the soft tissue needs to rebuild itself which is to increase circulation to the effected area. Blood flowing into the area removes the waste and brings nutrients to the cell tissue. That’s right! Massage works right down to the cellular level.

Reports and studies are being conducted all the time that show that a massage once a month reduces doctor visits and the amount of drugs people take. Everyone thinks of a massage after the pull a muscle and their back hurts but massage helps keep you well and is an important preventative measure you can take as well. So take the time to have some positive touch therapy and make massage a good habit.