HANDS ON HEALING
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HANDS ON HEALING By Katherine Griffin First he touched my shoulders, his hands steady and warm as he began slowly rubbing and kneading. As his hands ranged down my back, thumbs pressing on either side of my spine, I could feel the tension leaving my body like air from a collapsing balloon. By the time he started stroking the bottoms of my feet I had slipped into a blissful, floating darkness, oblivious to everything but the soothing sensations he created. What's more the man was wearing wing tips. and a tie. Of course, rubbing people the right way is nothing out of the ordinary for Lee Munro, a massage therapist and research associate at the University of Miami School of Medicine's Touch Research Institute. Housed on the sixth floor of a flamingo-pink tower in downtown Miami, the institute is the words first and only research center dedicated solely to studying how touch can promote health. Massage, in particular, after years of being dismissed as New Age mumbo jumbo, is attracting serious attention from medical researchers. Much of the credit for that transformation goes to Tiffany Field, the psychologist who leads the institute. Equal parts rigorous scientist and massage enthusiast, Field got interested in studying touch nearly 20 years ago, after her daughter was born prematurely and she began looking into ways to help other hospitalized preemies gain weight. Eleven years later she published a landmark paper showing that, over the course of ten days, preemies who were given 15 minutes of firm massage strokes three times daily gained 47 percent more weight-- and went home an average of six days sooner--than the babies who were merely touched or cuddled when being fed or diapered. "After that," Field says, "we started getting calls from people who wanted to do all kinds of studies." In 1992, buoyed by the response to her findings, she set up the institute, broadening the focus of her research to include children and adults. So far Field and her colleagues have confirmed what anybody who's ever had a good, professional massage can tell you: It feels fabulous. But they've also been documenting, by way of carefully designed studies, that massage's feel-good effects can translate into striking improvements in medical conditions ranging from asthma to rheumatoid arthritis to burns. Along the way, the researchers are shedding light on what massage can do for healthy people who want to ward off colds and viruses, cope more effectively with stress and pain, recover faster from hard exercise, sleep more soundly, and feel better about their bodies. "I don't want to sound too corny about this," says surgeon Michael Peck, who has collaborated with Field on several studies. "But the laying on of hands--there's real power in it." |
Massage Therapy and Healing Arts Center & Day Spa |
2100 Padre Blvd. Suite 3
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