We are very excited to be moving into a brand new facility the first or second week of July 2008.  The new facility is located at 14810 N. Florida Ave., just two and a half blocks south of Bearss Ave. on the west side of the road in the Mobley Homes Center.  One side of the new facility will be devoted to personal fitness, the other to our massage therapy services.  We will be adding new services with our new fitness area, and we are very pleased to have the services of LeShan Barrios who will be developing our Yoga program.  We will be starting the first Yoga class in our current facility soon, and are reserving space now.  Ask about our upcoming workshops which will familiarize you with the program.  LeShan is a very experienced instructor, and is the owner of Ananda Yoga of Tampa.  LeShan is also available for private Yoga sessions.  You may visit her website for more information and pricing. 

Stay tuned to our "News & Events" page for additional fitness services to be added.  We will be adding pictures soon to aid you in locating the new facility.  We will also be holding an Open House with special events, if you would like to be added to our e-mail list, please e-mail us at:  webmaster@timelesshealingarts.com, your e-mail privacy is a high priority and will ONLY be used for THA informational purpose

In this area, we will frequently offer articles of interest, written either by T.H.A. staff or by published authors of health related articles.  We hope you find the articles interesting and informative.

Contents:

Touch Deprivation:  The Stigma of Touch

Sciatica is it a Pinched Nerve?

Women's Brains More Vulnerable to Alcoholism

'Middle Age Spread' can raise heart attack risk

China Trip
 

Touch Research Abstracts Vol. 5 No. 2 Spring 1998

  Touch Deprivation:  The Stigma of Touch

  At least 30 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys are sexually molested before they are 18. Unfortunately, the high incidence of sexual abuse has been a great deterrent for healthy sexual development. Parents and teachers are afraid of touching children because their physical affection might be misinterpreted. Thus, children are deprived of touch at a very early age. That is also the reason that many day care centers no longer employ male teachers. The stigma of touch leads to touch deprivation.
  In the words of Ashley Montagu, "Such alarm is understandable in a society that has so confounded love, sex, affection, and touch. The genuinely loving parents have nothing to fear from their demonstrative acts of affection for the children or anyone else". The problem with gross misinterpretation of affection towards children is that it has made parents and teachers paranoid about hugging and touching the children, and the children have had to tolerate significantly less affection.
  A director of a model preschool in Massachusetts addressed the problem of potential lawsuits from teachers touching preschool children in a recent National Public Radio
interview. A caller asked her what her teachers would do if a child was hurt on the playground and came running to one of them. She said rather dispassionately that her teachers would be advised not to touch or hold the child.
  A multi-faceted observation study was recently conducted at the Touch Research Institute Nursery School. The study included: 1) the different types of touching the children received from their teachers and from the other children; 2) where on the body the touch occurred, and 3) whether the touch seemed to be for communication purposes or for affection. We found that despite our being a model nursery school, the teachers touched the children very little, particularly as they grew older. We then showed the data to the teachers who said they touched very little because they were concerned about their touching being misconstrued as sex abuse. After a discussion on acceptable types and places for touch the teachers increased their touching (and particularly affectionate touching).
  The stigma of touch extends to adolescents and adults, as is suggested by a study at Swarthmore College where students were told that they were going to be taken to a darkened room of people and then to a lighted room of people. In the dark room more than 90% of the student strangers touched each other, and almost 50% of them hugged each other, while almost none of the subjects in the lighted room did so. Subjects were too shy to touch when they could be seen, but more willing to touch in the anonymous dark. In another experiment students confined to a completely dark room for one week experienced a marked increase in touch sensitivity as well as sensitivity to pain.
  We recently conducted a massage therapy study to introduce touch on a psychiatric unit for adolescent psychiatric patients. In most psychiatric units across the world there is a "no touch" policy. Staff are concerned about the potential sexual abuse accusations and promiscuity between the kids. After being massaged for one-half hour a day for a week the children were less depressed, less anxious and their stress hormones (cortisol and norepinephrine) decreased. They also showed more organized sleep patterns and more appropriate behavior after massage therapy. Despite these significant changes and the earlier discharge and hospital cost savings, the program was never adopted. When the staff were asked what happened, they expressed two concerns. The sex of the therapist was one concern. If the therapist was of the opposite sex, some sexual acting out might occur.
  If the therapist was the same sex, the children/adolescents might become homophobic. Although the data showed no incidence of either problem, we switched to using volunteer grandparents as massage therapists. The second concern expressed by the staff was that the patients talked more during massage therapy than psychotherapy. Thus, the psychiatrists wanted us to tape record the sessions. Our solution was to simply tell the children and adolescents that massages are better without talking (and they usually are).  The program continued after these adjustments were made.
  In the 1960's American adolescents and adults made a special effort to overcome the stigma against touching by joining sensitivity training, encounter and marathon groups.  This human potential movement (which occurred primarily in places like Esalen and Berkeley, California) was oriented towards touch.  Touch activities included back rubs, massage, hands-on relaxation exercises, trust exercises (one person falls back into the arms of the other), love baths (everyone in the group hugs one another), and blind walks (one person leads the blindfolded partner on a walking journey teaching that person tactile discrimination). The movement inspired lots of
literature on touch including Jane Howard's Please Touch and a novel by Glenn Davis called Touching.   Several investigators including Dr. Prescott have suggested that touch deprivation in childhood leads to physical violence. Prescott has reported that most juvenile delinquents and criminals come from neglectful or abusive parents. He believes that "the deprivation of body touch, contact and movement are the basic causes of a number of emotional disturbances including depressive and autistic behaviors, hyperactivity, sexual aberration, drug abuse, violence and aggression. His theory is that the lack of sensory stimulation in childhood leads to addiction to sensory stimulation in adulthood resulting in delinquency, drug use and crime. This theory derived from a study conducted in 49 primitive cultures (from the Ainu to the Zuni). These cultures were notably similar except that in those where children received very little physical affection high rates of adult violence were noted, and no adult violence occurred in those cultures with high levels of physical affection towards children. These findings could of course relate to third variables like parental sexual abuse, although cultural differences on this and other negative effect variables were not found.
  Touch deprivation is also harmful to children because it severely affects sleep. Sleep is necessary not only as a stimulus barrier but also for conservation of energy. Touch deprivation caused by periods of separation from parents invariably leads to sleep disturbances in children. Heinicke and Westheimer studied 2 year-old children who were separated from their parents for 2 to 20 weeks and were living in an institution where they received less touch. Even after they were reunited with their parents, most of the children had difficulty falling asleep or remaining asleep. In all our studies on separations of very young children from their mothers, whether the children were separated for the mothers' hospitalization for the birth of another child or mothers' out-of-town conference trips, sleep was always affected. The time the children required to fall asleep was longer, and
nightwakings were more frequent. Although the children sometimes continued their "normal classroom behavior," sleep (both naptime and nighttime sleep) was typically the most affected of all the behaviors observed.

  Suppressed Immune Response

  Touch deprivation also affects the immune system. Steve Suomi has conducted a number of immune studies with monkeys testing the relationship between physical contact and the body's ability to respond to an immunological challenge (a tetanus shot). They found a direct relationship between the amount of contact and the amount of grooming an infant received in the first 6 or 7 months of life and its ability to produce antibody titre in response to an antibody challenge at a little over a year of age.
  A suppressed immune response has been noted in several studies following separation of monkeys from their mothers. This includes less antibody production in response to an initial injection of an antigen and less natural killer cell activity. One way that touch might influence the immune system is by lowering arousal levels and their accompanying stress hormones. Stress hormones are known to dampen the immune system. Social grooming among pigtail monkeys, for example, is associated with a decrease in heart rate and stress hormones. In turn, immune function improves. Immune function also improves in humans receiving deep pressure touch.
  Compromised immune function can also result from sleep disturbances which, as we discussed before, can be caused by touch deprivation. Dr. Martin Reite and his colleagues at the University of Colorado Medical Center found that after a 2-week separation from their mothers, infant bonnet monkeys experienced both sleep disturbances and a suppressed immune system. After reunion with their mothers their immune function returned to normal. The monkeys who were separated from their mothers showed depressed behavior including huddling in corners and changes in body temperature, heart rate, brain waves, and sleep patterns. Even after being reunited with their mothers, some of these symptoms persisted.
  In our studies on touch deprivation among preschool children who were separated from their mothers, we noted more frequent illnesses, particularly upper respiratory infections, diarrhea and constipation. In a study on younger infants (10 weeks old) the opposite effects were noted when the mothers provided extra tactile stimulation. The mothers were taught to massage their infants' backs, and the infants experienced fewer colds and less diarrhea approximately 4 months later.
  The skin secretes an immune hormone that is very similar to the hormone from the thymus gland that produces T cells. T cells are a significant part of the immune system because they destroy antigens. T cells are important for patients who have cancer or similar diseases. Ironically, both the immune system and the skin immune hormones are compromised because these diseases tend to decrease the desire for sex (even though people with cancer may desire more physical closeness) and thus the skin hormone is not secreted.  At a time when their immune system is severely compromised, their immune problem seems to be compounded by their lack of interest in sexual intimacy. Other forms of intimacy including holding, back rubbing, and comforting touch.