Touching others can help them heal, according to an article by a scientist at the University of California Riverside. When you walk forward holding hands with your beloved, you are not holding that person's hand with an iron grip. Instead, gentle contact occurs.
These touches are communicative. But they can also be medicinal, the researchers say. What does this say about touch in general? Light touch is involved in an activity called haptic tracking. This has important practical applications.
Haptic tracking has been studied as helping stroke patients or others with movement difficulties caused by high-level motor planning deficits. Such patients often lose the ability to plan and make voluntary movements of one hand. As a result, they often stop using one hand, preferring a good hand to a bad one.
This makes the situation even worse. The affected arm is used less and less and becomes weaker as a result. When the brain finally recovers to the point where it can regain control of the arm, it may be so weak that it atrophies. It would be helpful if there was a way to get stroke patients to continue using their limbs while they recover, the researchers said.
However, the passive movement of the affected limb, with the help of a physiotherapist or robot, has only limited success. Forcing a patient to use the affected limb by tying the active limb (called coercion therapy) may be logical, but unpleasant for patients. A light touch could form the basis of an effective new way to help stroke patients regain lost function.
If they could move their limbs without relying on the affected areas of the brain that planned the movements, then they could still be done. The muscles did not weaken, so the brain, when it recovered, could again command healthy, strong muscles, and not weak, atrophied ones.
Feelinger Tatiana