Acute Pain Is Eased With the Touch of a Hand, Study Shows

[HuckleB]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100923125111.htm

"There may be a very good reason that people naturally clutch their hand after receiving an injury. A new report published online Sept. 23 in Current Biology shows that self-touch offers significant relief for acute pain under experimental conditions. The researchers suggest that the relief comes from a change in the brain's representation of the rest of the body.

"Pain is quite an important, but also complicated, experience and can be caused in many different ways," said Patrick Haggard of University College London. "We show that levels of acute pain depend not just on the signals sent to the brain, but also on how the brain integrates these signals into a coherent representation of the body as a whole."

Haggard and his colleague Marjolein Kammers, also of University College London, made the discovery by studying the effects of self-touch in people who were made to feel pain using an experimental condition known as the thermal grill illusion (TGI). "The TGI is one of the best-established laboratory methods for studying pain perception," Haggard explained. "In our version, the index and ring fingers are placed in warm water and the middle finger in cold water. This generates a paradoxical feeling that the middle finger is painfully hot." That's ideal because it allows scientists to study the experience of pain without actually causing any injury to those who participate in the studies.

When TGI was induced in an individual's two hands and then the three fingers of one hand were touched to the same fingers on the other hand immediately afterwards, the painful heat experienced by the middle finger dropped by 64 percent compared to a condition without self-touch. That relief didn't come when only one hand was placed under TGI conditions. Partial self-touch in which only one or two fingers were pressed against each other didn't work either. Nor did it work to press the affected hand against an experimenter's hand that had also been warmed and cooled in the same way.

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I'm not surprised by the results of the study, but I'll be very interested to see what follows.

[tridim]

1. O'donnell isn't going to be happy at all about this "self-touch" therapy.

[HuckleB]

2. And what about all those unmarried nurses giving baths to sick people in hospitals?

That's got to stop.

[applegrove]

5. LOL!

[dkf]

3. The odd thing is the sensation of pain when there ought not to be.

Is that a mis-wire in our brain?

[Scuba]

4. Touch where?

[SheilaT]

6. You know how when your little kid

has a small boo-boo, and you kiss it to make it feel better? Once, when I bumped myself and had a minor hurt on my arm or hand or somewhere, I had my five year old kiss it to make it better. And it actually worked! I was quite amazed, never did any follow up research, and I'm sure it is quite purely a psychosomatic thing, very much a placebo effect, but it was still nice how well it worked.

[HuckleB]

7. If it's a small boo-boo, the study seems to indicate that touch helps the brain "reframe" itself.

Of course, with placebo, there are changes in the brain's response, so ... anyway, whatever one calls it, it's interesting to watch the brain do its job, and to see how such actions affect us.

:hi: