General Information

  Our experience shows touch methods have a highly positive effect on health.  For example,  bone marrow transplant patients at Stanford Hospital who received daily touch therapy treatments recovered an average of two weeks ahead of schedule.  Research sponsored by Johnson and Johnson has shown consistent positive effects of touch for  a wide variety of physical and mental afflictions across different populations and ages.  Because private touch therapy sessions are paid for out of pocket, and touch therapists are rather rare, we have created this website of Self Help instruction on touch so that anyone with an internet connection can learn about this.  In addition to the Self Help instructional  material our website provides general information on touch, including a historical account of touch by the first female physician, Elizabeth Blackwell,  a short  video on the anatomy of touch, recent lectures andresearch.   A very special film with pioneering nurse practitioner, Cheryl Gasner, shows a Touch Therapy session with researcher and instructor Cindy Mason that demonstrates this work. 

The touch methods on this web page work to effect positive moods, attitudes and physical health. This is important because mood and health influence each other through body chemistry.  Emotion based on the chemical state of our entire body, including the brain.  Likewise, the state of thephysical body cannot be separated from emotion.   Touch creates an electrical chemical message that begins on the surface of the skin and travels to many parts of the body and brain, creating positive mental, physical and emotional changes.  On our website you'll find  nuts and bolts resources on touch therapy (neurotherapy) with  hands-on educational materials from courses in self help acupressure developed in the Stanford and Berkeley healthcare communities. Using loving touch in healthcare is so natural, so simple, it could almost go unnoticed, except for the results it gives.   There are many situations where we may not receive sufficient touch in a non-sexual setting. 

From the patient's perspective, touch is very empowering, especially self-help touch.   Instead of feeling powerless over our health, we can  use  Hands-On self help to increase well being, reduce stress. steady our feelings, and create resiliency.  The research in Canada and other places seems to indicate touch could revolutionize health care if disease models and approaches to healing incorporate loving touch as a standard practice.  When practiced daily, Hands-On Self-Help can be an intervention tool in prevention and chronic care,  and is useful in disaster recovery, rural and remote health situations, or in the grass-root effort to age in the home.

Why Self Help?

  Talks, Papers, Research, Related Work

Slides

Happiness and Brain Plasticity (Kaiser Hospital - 2007) Integrating Eastern Modalities Into Western Healthcare Systems (Palo Alto VA - 2007)  Improving Quality of Life with Self-Help (Stanford Cancer Center 2007)

Relevant Papers, Reports, Links

All Self-Help instruction on this website are GREEN CARE - no medical waste is generated in either its development or use. It is also non-medicinal, requiring no drugs or equipment, and can be safely integrated with other medical tools.  It works by regenerating and supporting the body's own natural healing systems using methods based on touch. One square inch of skin contains approximately 21,000 nerve endings.  Nerves reach the entire length and breadth of the body and transmit signals through the spine to the brain, influencing glands, immune, fluids, heart rate, emotions, etc.

TOUCH AS MEDICINE -  Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician, understood the importance of touch in healing, regardless of whether the complaint was big or small. The idea of using touch as part of healing is as old as mankind. We are born of touch.  It was once an integral part of healthcare.  Some would say it is  common sense, but no longer so common.  People who are shut-in, who spend a lot of time in a sick bed or  wheel chair often report being touch starved. It improves our mood, lightens our heart, and gives us hope. It creates changes in immune response, increases density in spinal tissue, and influences our genes to change the way we respond to stress. There may come a day soon when love and touch are understood by science to be just as important to health as many of our pharmaceutical and surgical methods. When this day comes, the way we currently treat the sick will be viewed as archaic, backwards, and inhumane. The world of the sick is a very different world from the world of working and highly functional people. Few who have not experienced it will ever be able to imagine it. Luckily, there are those among us who have experienced it, lived through it, and are now sharing what they learned that helped. The acupressure recipes on our website are part of a large body of wisdom that is passed down through centuries of teacher-student relationships and are based on many hundreds of years of clinical expeience and observations.

Not only is touch a great human comfort, science has now shown it changes our response to stressors, improves the immune system, etc. (see some of the references on this website). As a form of Self-Help, acupressure is a great resource not only because of it positive effect on us, but also because it is so easily available. Learning it takes very little time but has a big impact on your health, no equipment is needed, and it is non-medicinal.   With the hands, all of use are capable of using acupressure on ourselves and those we care for to preserve and restore quality of life, in sickness and in health.

Global Medicine - A term coined by Dr. Mehmet Oz at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, refers to the idea that in little more than a decade, linkages between health care technologies of different cultures and continents have merged, resulting in global medicine technology. The next generation of young scientists and clinicians from both the research and clinical communities are merging established ancient technologies from outside the U.S. with modern medical technology and forging new ground in an increasingly challenging health care climate. Presently researchers, clinicians and communities are active in finding ways of using global medical technology to attack our most difficult and chronic (therefore expensive) health care problems. Using recent inventions such as the fMRI, researchers and clinicians are understanding how and why they work.
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