Healing Hands: The Therapeutic Benefits of Touch

A pat on the back. A warm hug. Holding hands. It’s what we miss most while distancing. As a physiotherapist, my hands are a part of my work. I use them to apply skilled hands-on techniques (known as manual therapy) to assess and treat my patients. With my hands, I can feel the quality of movement of any joint in the body, differentiating between stiff and supple. I can feel tissue health, find trigger points, scar tissue, and injury sites. I can feel muscle guarding or protecting reactions that often come with pain. Manual therapy requires knowledge of anatomy, biomechanics and neurophysiology. It takes years of practice to master, but it’s one of the most inspiring parts of my “hands-on” job.

Both dance and physiotherapy usually involve a hands-on approach.

The science of touch helps to explain why manual therapy helps. First, touch provides pain relief. We have receptors under our skin that detect a variety of signals including pain, temperature, movement, light touch, and pressure. Since our body can only process so many signals at once, using touch to activate pressure or movement receptors helps to block signals from the pain receptors before they travel to the brain, known as the gate control theory (1). Second, touch provides valuable input when trying to learn healthy ways of moving. Without saying a word, tactile cues help us to identify sensations of pain or stretching, determine whether we moving with the appropriate amount of effort, and develop awareness of one body part relative to another.

This celebration dance isn’t complete without hands to throw and catch.

While manual therapy techniques are based on the physical properties of touch, there’s more to it than that. In the Oxford Dictionary, the word touching not only refers to physical contact, but also to strong feelings of sympathy, appreciation or gratitude. A recent article in Musculoskeletal Science and Practice similarly suggests that “touch requires technical skills linked with sympathetic contact with each other” (2). According to the authors, the combination of good communication skills and hands-on skills fosters a trusting therapeutic relationship, which in turn has emotional benefits. Therefore, even in physical therapy, the benefit of touch reaches beyond the physical.

REFERENCES

Melzack R, Wall PD. Pain mechanisms: a new theory. Science. 1965; 150:971–979.
Tommaso G et al. Manual Therapy: Exploiting the Role of Human Touch. Musculoskeletal Science and Practice. 2019; 44(10).