Years ago, when I was Associate Director of the pediatric clinics at the Stanford Medical School, one of my colleagues, Marshall Klaus, did a study which at the time was extremely innovative. He was chief of the intensive care nursery, where all the babies were these tiny little people you could hold in your hand. Each incubator was surrounded by shifts of people and millions of dollars worth of equipment. Everything was high-tech. Of course, we didn’t touch these infants because we’d get germs on them. But Klaus decided to do an experiment in which half the babies in the nursery would be treated as usual, and the other half would be touched for fifteen minutes every few hours. You’d take your pinky finger and rub it down the little baby’s back. And we discovered that the babies that were touched survived better. No one knows why. Maybe there’s something about touching that strengthens the will to live. Maybe isolation weakens us.
- Rachel Naomi Remen, Cofounder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, as interviewed by Bill Moyers in Healing and the Mind
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