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Massage has many benefits including general relaxation and increased circulation. Many experience pain relief from massage and may need less medication. This article describes how nurses and families can learn to provide touch therapy to patients with varying stages of dementia.
Two studies are reported in which comprehension and interpretation of raised-line images and graphs by touch were investigated. Experiment 1 required blind-folded sighted subjects and blind subjects to rate the veracity of raised-line drawings in conveying the nature of an image when the complexity of the depicted object was manipulated (from simple outlines to more complex exaggeration of salient features). Results showed no effect of complexity on veracity ratings. Experiment 2 involved the assessment of blind and visually impaired subjects of line-graphs, histograms and pie charts which varied in information content and perceptible detail (textured and untextured). Histograms were easier to interpret than line-graphs, but there were no differences between histograms and pie charts. An increase in information content had little effect on comprehension.
OBJECTIVE: This pilot study set out to investigate whether a relationship exists between differential quality and quantity of physical contact experience and perceptions of parenting, psychological adjustment, and suicidal behavior among adolescents. METHOD: A self-report questionnaire assessed individuals' perceptions of how frequently they experienced pleasant (positive) and unpleasant (negative) touch from family and friends. Together with the Achenbach Youth Self-Report and the Parental Bonding Instrument, this questionnaire was administered to 142 male and 129 female students aged between 13 and 15 years (mean = 13.54, SD = 0.56) attending a randomly chosen metropolitan state high school and a coeducational private school. RESULTS: The major findings indicated that differential quality and quantity of physical contact experience was related to perceptions of parenting, psychological adjustment, and suicidal behavior, although a gender difference was observed. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that physical contact experiences may reflect different parenting styles and may be a vulnerability factor for a range of difficulties among adolescents.
Therapeutic Touch is a manifestation of compassion. It reaches beyond the physical body and its parts. It connects one with the underlying order of the universe. TT is a skill that is invaluable in the care of the PWA on many levels, whether to ease the transition in dying or to ease the discomforts in living. It lies at the heart of healing.
Representing the largest published sample size of therapeutic touch (TT) outcomes to date, data from this continuous quality improvement (CQI) clinical study suggests that TT, when provided in the clinical setting, promotes comfort, calmness, and well-being among hospitalized patients. In addition, patients are highly satisfied with TT. The newly developed Patient Satisfaction Survey and TT Performance Improvement Tool provide an effective means by which to evaluate a TT program.
The purposes of this descriptive pilot study were to address conceptual inconsistencies and several other methodologic problems identified in previous Therapeutic Touch (TT) research, while also providing direction for future TT studies by attempting to determine the appropriateness and suitability of a combination of psychologic and immunologic measures in the ongoing empiric evaluation of TT. Research questions were derived from a unitary perspective. Data on both practitioners and recipients were collected and examined for patterns and relationships. Changes that may be related to TT were observed in immunologic, psychologic, and unitary measures. Directions for future research within a unitary framework were postulated.
Nursing has been dedicated throughout its history to addressing the physical, psychologic, and spiritual aspects of the patient that influence the healing process. Current nursing practice in acute care is focused increasingly on monitoring equipment, giving medications, and administering medical treatments in a fast-paced environment that affords few opportunities for the deeper human connectedness between the nurse and the one who is ill and suffering. Healing touch (HT) is an energy-based complementary therapy fostering that nurse-patient connection. Nurses are beginning to use HT with their patients to assist in easing pain and anxiety, promote relaxation, accelerate wound healing, diminish depression, and increase a patient's sense of well-being. This article reports a conceptual framework for use of HT in acute care settings, describes specific HT techniques, and reviews numerous studies that have reported positive outcomes of HT as a noninvasive complementary therapy.
A problem when comparing active and passive tactile perception of two-dimensional (2-D) stimuli is matching the active and passive tasks on all variables except the one of interest--active versus passive touch. A new computer-controlled device--the tactile display system (TDS)--has been developed to deal with this problem. The TDS tracks an "active" subject's fingertip movements during exploration of a raised line drawing and digitally records this spatio-temporal information. It then guides a passive participant's fingertip over the same path, matching for location and speed. Any difference in performance can thus be attributed to the different conditions (active versus passive) because other variables are held constant.
Stochastic resonance (SR) occurs when the detection of a subthreshold signal is aided by the presence of random energy fluctuations in the signal modality, commonly called noise. SR is counterintuitive because such noise usually worsens performance. Nonetheless, SR has been demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally in human sensory systems. Using a psychophysically sophisticated paradigm, we show that SR aids the detection of vibrating touch stimuli presented to the foot soles of both healthy elderly people with elevated vibrotactile thresholds and healthy young people with normal vibrotactile thresholds. The results also suggest that it is possible to know a priori the amount of noise needed for optimal SR effects given the degree to which the signal is subthreshold. Thus, SR may be practical as a rehabilitative aid for individuals with elevated sensory thresholds.
The principles of cross-modal integration were investigated with an auditory-tactile illusion in sighted and congenitally blind adults. Participants had to judge the number of rapidly presented tactile stimuli, which were presented together with task-irrelevant sounds. When one tactile stimulus was accompanied by more than one tone, participants reported perceiving more than a single touch. This illusion was more pronounced in sighted than congenitally blind participants. Given that the congenitally blind were more precise in judging the number of tactile stimuli in a control condition without tones, the present data are in accordance with a modality-appropriateness account suggesting that interference by a task-irrelevant modality is reduced if processing accuracy of the task-relevant modality is high.
The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the patient's experience of receiving therapeutic touch (TT) treatments. The design was informed by phenomenology in the sense that it was searching for a definition of the lived experience of the phenomenon of TT. Data were obtained through one open-ended interview and a second clarifying interview of each subject. All data were subjected to content analysis. For participants, the lived experience of TT was described as a linear process that began with the perceived need for and decision to seek treatment. It progressed through one or more treatments and continued to have an impact upon the participants' lives. These findings were examined within the context of Martha Rogers' conceptual system. This study has shown that, for 20 participants receiving treatment, TT was a fulfilling multidimensional experience that facilitated personal growth. Such as experience can only enrich the lives of those who receive treatment. Certainly, a nursing intervention that can achieve such a positive influence has potential for use in all areas of nursing care and needs to be explored further.
The use of touch and space by nursing staff is critical in all aspects of patient care. How patients and nurses perceive the use and possible abuse of these encounters is the subject of this research. Data were collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with staff and patients. Interpretation of data was inherently from an anthropological perspective. There were some similarities between staff and patients' perceptions of space/touch interactions, for example what constituted personal space, but also some differences, which may have implications for clinical practice, namely gender and age of both staff and patients during intimate tasks. The construction of the ward environment was identified as being crucial in developing a 'new reality', within which altered expectations emerged as to what was considered to be acceptable or unacceptable behaviour. The conflict between primary and professional socialization is an issue which may need to be examined further in educational institutions.
Using touch as a medium for exploring the ways in which it is constructed by nurses, the body is here characterized by a plethora of competing and co-existing terms: disobedient, obedient, mirroring, stigmatized, sinful, post-mortem, sanitized, angelic, desexualized, dangerous, dominant, dominating, deceitful, submissive, disciplined, postmodern and communicative. We have tried to be provocative by juxtaposing contradictory messages and evoking conflicting emotions, and we hope that the reader will not assume that we believe everything we write, or that everything may be taken only at face value. There are as many messages and meanings in the paper as each reader thinks there are.
To investigate the mechanism underlying tactile spatial attention, reaction times (RTs) and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in response to mechanical stimuli delivered to the hands. At the start of each trial cues indicated either the correct (valid) or incorrect (invalid) tactile stimulus location or were uninformative (neutral). RT costs (suppression of invalid compared to neutral trials) were found to be larger than benefits (enhancement of valid compared to neutral trials). ERPs showed that costs and benefits contribute equally to attentional modulations of the somatosensory N140 component, whereas these were largely due to costs at longer latencies. These results differ from the pattern of attentional ERP modulations previously found for vision and audition, where costs precede benefits, and therefore suggest that the mechanisms of attentional selectivity in touch might be different from attentional processes in other modalities.
In 100 persons whose ages ranged from 20 to 89 years, palatal sensitivity to touch (by air current) was measured. Sensitivity diminished progressively with age.
PURPOSE: To document immediate and short-term biobehavioral effects of therapeutic touch (TT), estimate the magnitude of TT effects, and compare TT effects to placebo responses. DESIGN: A repeated measures, pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. TT and mimic TT were administered using standardized protocols to 11 adults in a controlled setting. METHODS: Four physiological (total pulse amplitude, blood pressure, pulse, temperature) and three subjective (stress, self-assessment of health, time perception) variables were evaluated over 24 hours. FINDINGS: Total pulse amplitude and time perception decreased significantly immediately after TT intervention, indicating vasoconstriction and time passing "faster," with large and medium effect sizes significantly greater than were placebo responses. Vasodilation, a relaxation response, was expected instead of vasoconstriction. CONCLUSIONS: TT may have adverse and positive outcomes.
1. The receptor terminals of individual mechanosensory neurones responding to light touch (T cells) have been visualized directly in the skin of the leech by injecting horseradish peroxidase (HRP) into their cell bodies in the central nervous system. The axons of injected cells could be followed from their origin in the neuropile of the ganglion to their terminals in the skin. 2. The axons of T cells run through ipsilateral nerve roots in the body wall to the base of the layer of epithelial cells in the skin. Here axons branch extensively and turn between the epithelial cells to end a few microns from the skin surface. These terminals are situated in intercellular spaces immediately below the junctional complex joining the outer ends of the epithelial cells. 3. The T cell terminals are free nerve endings with a beaded appearance; they contain large mitochondria and clusters of vesicles. 4. An individual T cell makes about 100 endings within a square millimetre of skin in the centre of its territory, and is estimated to make a total of several hundred endings. 5. The distribution of T cell endings observed directly agrees with physiological studies of receptive field organization and emphasizes the high degree of specificity of connexions of these neurones with their peripheral targets.
A brief survey is made of some of the threads of research and theory that have converged upon the problems of application of the touch sense to the task of substituting for the hearing process.