Out of touch

Can it be the lack of simple human contact that is slowly destroying modern society?

A few years ago, you’d mention massage to the average joe, and you’d get a very funny look and some embarrassed shuffling. ‘Massage’ was too often followed by ‘parlour’ in people’s minds and it took a few minutes to make the therapeutic, healing, safe and asexual case.
These days massage – actually a long list of touch therapies – is again established as part of a healthy living regime. How history repeats itself: Hippocrates, father of Western medicine, said that only three things are necessary for prolonged health: regular exercise, sensible diet, and regular massage.
Early on in my year’s training in massage, our teacher stated what seemed like an outrageous opinion: ‘If each of us had a massage every day or even every week, hospitals would soon be out of business.’ He talked about touch deprivation, the lack of simple human contact that means that most of us crave touch, although we probably don’t even realise it. We might call it loneliness – we all know that it’s perfectly possible to be lonely in a crowd, lonely in a marriage. It’s not solitude that gets you, it’s the being out of touch.
Remember the shock of seeing pictures of young children in Romanian orphanages, almost catatonic, standing behind the bars of their cots, faces devoid of emotion. They were starving, not from lack of food, but from lack of human contact. Too many children and not enough staff. No-one with time to play with them, talk to them, hold them. The medical term is marasmus: failure to thrive and dying for no apparent reason.
Harry Harlow’s famous study touch deprivation in the 1960s and 1970s showed that of the five basic senses, touch was the one essential to life. Harlow took newborn monkeys from their mothers and put them in a cage with two surrogate ‘mothers’ made from wire round a wooden frame, one wrapped in soft terry cloth. In every way the monkeys were well cared for, except they had no contact with other monkeys or even the scientists. The baby monkeys clung to the soft cloth surrogate and refused to move away even though the feeding bottle was attached to the other surrogate. Touch was more important than food. Skin hunger is worse than starvation.
Ever wonder about babies lying in incubators, row on row of them, in maternity hospitals sometimes long after their mothers have gone home?
Ever wonder about the elderly, who have lost touch with spouses and children, isolated and lonely?
Tony Cawley, a psychotherapist based in Liverpool, is frustrated by the lack of attention to the importance of touch given by his profession. ‘It’s obvious to me how incredibly powerful touch is to the mind, but mind doctors aren’t allowed to touch their clients. Therapists don’t even talk about touch: it’s extraordinary.
‘The response of the psychotherapy profession to the work of Harlow and Bowlby is conspicuous by its absence. Why? Are we so shy of touch because it leads to the thorny subject of sexuality?’
Western society is now obsessed with what is termed ‘inappropriate touching’; the paedophile is the modern Beelzebub. Britain has been a very disconnected nation since Victorian times, at least; touch is conducted under strict but unwritten rules. It’s worst for men: their best chance of allowable touch is on the sports field, where contact sports and horseplay in the changing rooms are acceptable. Other than that, it’s the very pissed bloke who wraps his arms round his mate and, tears in his eyes, says: ‘I love you, I do,’ only to get some expletives and an embarrassed shove from his mate - unless he too is a bottle of vodka or several joints to the worse.

In many academic and clinical studies, touch deprivation is linked to aggression and violence. In the 1970s James Prescott studied 400 human societies and found that those who lavished affectionate touch on their children, and were tolerant of teenage sex, were the least violent societies on earth. He also found the converse true.
Touch is the first sense to develop in the human foetus. The skin is the body’s largest organ, and develops from the same stem cells as the brain. Frequent pleasurable touch for infants results in positive change in brain tissue, while chronic touch deprivation or trauma results in measurable brain damage. Many studies have shown the critical importance of good touch to the developing infant and the growing child. It remains vital – touch-deprived adults may turn to food, alcohol or drugs to make up for the lack of physical contact, or adopt behaviours from promiscuous sex to shop lifting.
Touch, or the lack of it, can dramatically affect emotional, mental and physical health. It has huge implications for society, let alone the family and the individual. So my massage teacher’s claim doesn’t seem so outrageous after all. It begins to look as though touch could be the philosopher’s stone of human health, so perhaps the NHS should sack a lot of managers and hire some top notch bodyworkers.
However, the degree of positive benefits from massage and other forms of healing touch depend, like one’s bank account, on the relationship between client and service provider. Anyone who has had great massage will not need telling about the clinically proven benefits, from neurochemical changes to skeletal realignment. If you’ve met the wrong bodyworker, though, you can stagger from the treatment room feeling as though you’ve been through a punishment beating.
There are over 150 different bodywork techniques at the last count, not to mention more subtle techniques such as quantum touch, zero balancing and cranio-sacral therapy – so it’s a question of finding what works for you.
If the technique suits you, then find a practitioner who has enough skill, experience and subtlety to make it work. Even the simplest of techniques can have fabulous results if the practitioner is good. Quantum touch is the least showy of healing techniques, being a systemised form of the natural ability of one human to help another to heal with simple touch and intent.
Traditional Swedish massage (so called because it was a system devised by a Swede, Per Henrik Ling, from various techniques he observed around the world) can be dull as ditchwater or downright unpleasant if the masseur has the sensitivity of a brick. In the hands of a master, however, it can be as complete a therapy as anyone could want.
Gerry Pyves’ No Hands massage technique, for instance, are a rare experience. The quality of touch comes from the practitioner’s entire body using an enormous variety of strokes and movements to produce a gentle and painless massage as deep and powerful as any of the ‘deep’ techniques which can be excruciatingly painful. Developed orginally to save masseurs’ hands and arms from injury, No Hands has turned out to be a remarkable move on for the client as well as the practitioner.
No surprise, then, to discover that Gerry Pyves was the massage teacher who had as much faith in his practice as did Hippocrates. He still does: ‘I believe doctors would transform the health of this nation if they were to listen better to their first teacher.’
The research points to Hippocrates having it right 2,500 years ago. Let’s learn from history, for once, and put more trust in the innate ability of humans to heal with the tools we were born with: head, hands and heart.

www.nohandsmassage.com
www.quantumtouch.com