Hands-On Healing:

July 3, 2025 - by Lindsay Paulsen

Touch has long been a part of healing, yet with today’s rapid advancements in technology and artificial intelligence, it’s a practice that’s easy to overlook—and one we must not forget.

As we teach key principles of bedside medicine, we also aim to remind our fellow health care providers why touch, in its various forms, plays such a critical role in healing. Our perspectives are driven by personal experience (see Abraham Verghese’s anecdote below), but there are also fascinating research findings that highlight the power of touch and its role in healing.  

Abraham Verghese on “A Doctor’s Touch” 

In our founder Abraham Verghese’s July 2011 TEDTalk, “A Doctor’s Touch,” he describes the decline of physical exams in modern medicine. While his presentation is now many years old, his words still ring true, perhaps more than ever. 

He shares an unsettling yet powerful story about a 40-year-old woman who was brought into the emergency room with confusion and high blood pressure and then went into cardiac collapse. After she was resuscitated and stabilized, she received a CAT scan, which revealed bilateral, visible and palpable breast masses that had metastasized across her body. “The real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen at four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years — four or five opportunities to see the breast mass, touch the breast mass and intervene at a much earlier stage,” Verghese explains. “That is not an unusual story. Unfortunately, it happens all the time.” 

He continues: “When we shortcut the physical exam, when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient, we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable, early stage, but we’re losing much more than that. We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent and is at the heart of the patient physician relationship.” 

Throughout his TEDTalk, Dr. Verghese emphasizes “the power of the human hand to touch, to comfort, to diagnose and to bring about treatment.”

Research On Human Touch

As Verghese explains, the human hand has incredible power as a diagnostic tool, but it also has important emotional and physical benefits for patients. Here’s what recent research indicates: 

According to a meta-analysis by Packheiser and co-workers, 2024, described by Psychiatry Today, data from 137 different studies and 13,000 volunteers indicates touch benefits both physical and mental well-being. For example, in infants, touch interventions were found to help regulate stress hormones, temperature, respiration and liver function. In adults, touch interventions were shown to reduce feelings of depression, anxiety and physical pain. The article also points out that touch has positive effects whether it comes from someone familiar, like a friend giving a hug, or from a healthcare professional, such as a licensed massage therapist.

In “Hands On Research: The Science of Touch,” published in University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine, Dacher Keltner writes, “Hands are far more profound than we usually realize: They are our primary language of compassion, and a primary means for spreading compassion.” Research from Keltner’s lab supports this idea, exploring whether humans can communicate compassion through touch. In one study, researchers placed a barrier between two strangers. One person extended their arm through the barrier, while the other was given a list of emotions and asked to convey each one through a one-second touch to the stranger’s forearm. The person being touched then tried to guess the emotion. With many emotions in play, the chance of guessing correctly was only about eight percent—yet participants identified compassion correctly nearly 60 percent of the time.

Keltner also cites research noting that preterm newborns who received just three 15-minute sessions of touch therapy each day for 5 to 10 days gained 47 percent more weight than those who received standard medical care alone.

Additionally, he references work by neuroscientist Edmund Rolls, explaining that touch activates the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex—an area associated with feelings of reward and compassion.

These findings remind us that the simple yet profound act of human touch remains one of our most powerful tools for healing and it’s one that we must not lose sight of in our daily practice.