The place of touch in medicine

Press, 2 June 1984, Page 20

The place of touch in medicine

Touching is Healing: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Medicine. By Jules Older. Stein and Day, 1984. 300 pp. $36.50.

(Reviewed by

Ralf Unger)

Touching in treating the sick, writes Dr Older, who is a senior lecturer in psychology at the Otago School of Medicine, is a missing element in the curricula of medical schools, graduate psychology programmes, and schools of social work throughout the Englishspeaking world. The avowed purpose of his book is to make better touchers of our healers, and to take away the taught prohibitions about touching expressed in his “Psyku” — a psychological haiku: touching Not touching is not a is a technique: technique. Animal experiments with rats, he quotes, showed that any physical contact, including painful electric shock, led to positive effects on such factors as friendliness in the same way as it does with disturbed children who, if they cannot get positive attention, will settle for negative attention such as being beaten. Again a little verse by Dr Older

expresses this: “The hugged child will thrive. The hit child will survive. The untouched child will die.” Studies in other cultures show a direct correlation between the degree of deprivation of infant physical affection and adult physical violence. Massage, in its therapeutic sense, the author believes should be applied liberally and understandingly, particularly to groups who miss out on it in their ordinary day-to-day lives — such as the elderly, whose dry, wrinkled skin “seems to be more the result of lack of physical contact than the product of sun and age.” In an American group dedicated to exploring the possibilities and excitements of old age,” the group enjoyed their massage and became lovelier, pinker, and wrinkles vanished ... they began to look really vital and beautiful.” Miraculous healers used touch and anointment with oil, often in the name of the Lord. History is full of inadequately documented cures, including the early work of Sigmund Freud who in his treatment laid hands on the head of the patient to promote healing. Dr Older has a snappy, rollicking

style of delivering his material which, at New Zealand conferences, has always guaranteed him an entertained audience of both professionals and laymen. His sincerity in his gospel of the importance of skin contact between isolated envelopes of flesh is infectious. The documentation is full and fascinating. One does wonder, however, whether this should have blossomed into a full book with considerable repetitiveness of ideas and validation; whether it will influence the emergence of touching professionals when the cultural taboo against this is closely intertwined with symbolic incest prohibitions of adult and child; when the weakness of even professional flesh is highlighted by well publicised libel claims by patients where therapeutic aims have become too personalised. Touching is a two-edged weapon of both healing, as this book emphasises, and manipulation towards the will of the dominant person. Dr Older’s effect on a generation of medical practitioners he has taught in New Zealand will be an interesting one to survey in a follow-up study.