Healing Power of Touch Helps Relieve Pain - Swedish Research

That subtle stroke, that gentle pat on the back, that tight hug - all can work magic. Not only do they serve as signs of appreciation but also help in alleviating pain, a new Swedish research suggests.

Gentle stroking activates ‘pleasure nerves’ or ‘C-tactile fibers’ – nerves that teem up the skin – thus stopping other fiber nerves from delivering messages of pain to the brain, researchers found.

Where on one hand signals to the brain from the nerves that detect the pleasurable stroking were found by researchers to dampen the signals from nerves that detect pain, on the other hand researchers also tried to calculate the right way of touching that could produce optimum pleasure.

"The picture that is emerging is that there are two separate nerves for painful and pleasurable touch.

"They also seem to mediate each other, so rubbing does make pain feel better," Professor Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist at Liverpool University, noted.

Trials revealed that applying a painful heat stimulus of 47°C to the skin and then stroking it with a camel hair brush – a stroking machine that can provide specific speeds and pressures - led to easing of the pain network and the sensation of pain.

Also, “the most pleasurable way to touch someone was to stroke at around two inches per second across the skin and applying pressure equivalent to a third of the weight of a five pence coin.” McGlone pointed.

Moreover, using brain scans while exposing volunteers to painful temperatures, researchers found that when they were being stroked gently, volunteers experienced less pain as compared to times when they were not being stroked.

Though the healing power of touch was already known, the new scientific discovery could pave the way for new treatments to check conditions ranging from chronicitching to depressiondefine.