Skin is not only a protective layer covering our body, it also has many other functions, and among them the tactile one will be discussed in more detail in the next part. Before getting there, a few more general facts are necessary to state. Besides the oral cavity, breath, and occasional intestinal gases, skin is the most intense source of odor information,1 which is a significant—though not always fully conscious—communicative element.2 For that reason, the next part of this text will focus more on smell, which has its own logic, even though it may seem distant. I smell, I smell human beings…
The sentence continues with the question, “Who do you have here, mother?” Grandfather Vševěd — as is clear — might not have known everything, but even after a day of fatigue his sense of smell was good, so in an examination oriented to this characteristic he would have fallen into the population quartile where dementia, not even MCI (mild cognitive impairment), is not a threat, as happens with people whose loss of smell progresses faster than their chronological age.3 He should also have been able to enjoy food perfectly, and his sexual life should have been similarly good. All these areas of life are influenced by olfaction, and we — to our shame — do not even have abstractions for individual olfactory impressions, but we say: it smells (stinks) like… There are actually orders of magnitude more odors than three basic colors, five tastes, or eight tones.
Before we get to humans, let’s look at the creature that, in my view, is among the most studied, the neural giant Caenorhabditis elegans or the roundworm. The worm has 22,000 genes, which is only three thousand fewer than humans. It has far fewer neurons, however: exactly 302, with about 8,000 connections among them. It feeds on bacteria and, since it has no eyes, it has to sniff out and taste its food.4 It especially likes bacteria containing a compound called diacetylene. It has around 2,000 genes for smell, which is twice as many as a rat has. (The rat, however, does not have to eat bacteria.)
What is most interesting in the entire perception is that this worm’s whole nervous system responds both to pleasant and aversive stimuli. It is not a sequential evaluation, but a generalized response. Researchers initially thought this pattern was specific to worms, but it has recently been proven also in mice. It is still an open question how human organisms react to what is often only subliminal olfactory stimulus.
The human olfactory pathway has two neurons—two branches. The first leads to the olfactory brain, and the second branches out into all major brain regions, emotional, memory, and cognitive. This richness of projection sites shows the enduring importance of smell, which we still underestimate. Unlike hearing and vision, senses that receive signals continuously, we mostly smell during inhalation (some molecules can also reach olfactory endings through the oral cavity), and for that reason we do not give olfactory impressions as much attention and mostly register them subliminally. This does not mean they have no effect. On the contrary, they have a very significant effect, and projections to the hippocampus indicate that we remember these impressions—often from the earliest years of life, more so than for other senses—and that they connect with others, which can trigger highly interesting associations;5 Swedish authors proposed the acronym LOVER, from limbic-old-vivid-emotional-rare (“limbic activation, that is, emotionally powerful, old, highly vivid, emotional, and rare”).6 On the other hand, they can also be emotionally powerful and relatively fresh, for example, linked to recent traumatic memories.7
There is debate over whether at least functional remnants of Jacobson’s vomeronasal organ exist in humans. It is highly developed in all lower animals and in New World monkeys and has an important role in sexual activity by detecting pheromones.8 In humans this is not entirely clear, and scientists still dispute it despite improved techniques.9
However, there is one experiment that could support the existence of such an organ. It took place in 1995 in Bern and was carried out by zoology professor (a human is an animal, too!) Claus Wedekind.10 He selected 49 young women and 44 young men and constructed the sample to have as wide a variability as possible in a trait called HLA (human leucocyte antigen)—the major histocompatibility antigen, a genetically determined immune component that discriminates “self” from “non-self.” It is used, for example, in organ transplantation, where the more similar the HLA systems are, the less the recipient’s body attempts to reject the transplanted organ (to literally “spit it out,” as one might say, like a splinter). Only identical twins share the same HLA.
Wedekind dressed the young men in T-shirts and had them wear and sleep in them for two days, then put those shirts in special boxes and invited the young women to sniff six selected shirts and decide which of those “stinkers” they would take home. The results were striking. The women unerringly chose partners with HLA systems as dissimilar as possible to their own—thus providing optimal genetic equipment for offspring. But those who used hormonal contraception chose the opposite, the closest match—thus the worst choice in terms of the future child’s health. All this would point to olfactory perception of pheromones (or something very close to them). This is perhaps, from Mother Nature’s perspective, the most essential thing (as I write this, it is her holiday today, but by the time I finish, many holidays will pass).
From the perspective of daily coexistence, one must consider another dozens of odor cues. These arise through secretions from sebaceous and sweat glands and through the activity of whole colonies of skin microbes, yeasts, fungi, and parasites, mostly harmless and useful, which both process those products and multiply in them. Their composition depends on host sex, age, location on the body, immune status, occupation and exposure to various influences, hygiene standards, and different diseases. Some diseases can even be diagnosed based on odor characteristics. So we smell good or bad, and in return they smell us.
We have on average 200,000 sebaceous glands and millions of sweat glands in the skin. The question of who sweats more, men or women, has been settled 1:1, with larger and more robust individuals sweating more.11 Most of them secrete sweat without any smell, but some include molecules we can perceive. What we can also smell in sweat is fear—the substances activated when it breaks out. Fear sweat smells very differently than sweat from exertion. We may also perceive aggression in an approaching individual, and in our world more rarely, but still detectable, joy. Several grams of sebum are produced per day; sweat output can reach liters per hour. In that, colonies of bacteria bathe, skin bacteria that are highly specific to different regions of the body.12
Researchers often use an analogy to describe this problem through colonization of Earth. For such tiny creatures as bacteria, the distance from the root of the nose to the corner of the mouth is like a trip from Prague to Greece is for us. Everywhere there are people, and each time they are somewhat different and have somewhat different habits. In one place flax is cultivated, in another corn, in another there is an orchard. This is why different bacteria from the same or very similar substrate produce different molecules. A trained sniffing dog, if you ask it to sniff someone’s socks, will not, in my experience, connect those with the person’s hat (if it had not smelled the hat first), and will not recognize that person by it—because it has completely different odor characteristics.
The greatest concentration of sebaceous glands is in the armpits and in the groin (here hair plays a role, and its removal, often justified aesthetically and hygienically, is against nature), then in the navel pit, in the external auditory canal, and surprisingly also on the eyelids, where we barely notice it. They produce sebum and steroids—water-soluble compounds that are odorless by themselves. Only bacteria from the large family Corynebacteria turn these into androsterones with a characteristic smell. Because men have substantially more of these glands, they are much more intensely smelled than women. In old age, when androgenic steroids decrease for both sexes, this odor difference between them fades and disappears. Conversely, the smell of children’s hair, described as similar to peach compote, is ensured by activity of the yeast Pityrosporum ovale. These are remarkable things!
In older times of medicine, sniffing was inseparable from diagnostic methods, and was recommended and used by Hippocrates and Galen. In the Middle Ages, that was reversed and characteristic odor was mistakenly considered the cause of illness. Hence all kinds of fumigation and other procedures that were thought to be therapeutic. On the other hand, it should be said that vapors of burning frankincense truly have disinfecting effects. It was the flies that clearly sensed sugar in the urine of dogs from whom researcher Minkowski had removed the pancreas that led that practitioner to think this was where diabetes actually arose. And for these patients we most often diagnose the cause of a coma-like state at first sniff by the typical smell of acetone.
Given that canine olfactory sensitivity is roughly a thousandth? Actually around one hundred thousand times (±21) more sensitive than the most sensitive human sense of smell, it is a plausible line of thought to use dogs’ properties diagnostically for a wide range of diseases and disorders. Tumor disorders and some metabolic disorders have been described.13 Trained dogs detect hypoglycemia in diabetic patients in more than a third of cases.14 In diabetics this is unquestionably olfactory perception. What happens in cases where a dog is able to predict its owner’s epileptic seizure is hard to say. Reports about alerts provided by seizure alert dogs are also rare (about 10% of the dogs did this).
As among researchers there is no agreement on the existence of the vomeronasal organ, disagreements also persist regarding existence and function of substances called pheromones (see note 9). The word itself is a combination of Greek ferein (“to carry”) and hormé (“urge, drive”). In the animal kingdom these substances are associated with sexual activity and reproduction, but they also provide interesting information about an individual (for example, where it is in group hierarchy, what food it has recently eaten), and they can also influence emotional tone and even neuroendocrine functions (for example, regulation of the menstrual-ovulatory cycle). For example, a mouse that has just become pregnant will terminate its pregnancy if it senses, nearby, the presence of a higher-quality male and wait for him as a better father of her offspring. Conversely, proximity to a lactating mouse evokes and triggers in neighboring females some elements of maternal behavior.**
In humans, it appears that especially the androsterones spreading from the armpit pits influence behavior in both sexes, probably more so in women than in men. A typical example is the well-known synchronization of menstrual cycles in predominantly female collectives. Although this experience is widely shared, it was first described objectively in 1970, then replicated in various groups—from sports teams to women living together in different cultural settings—there are researchers who “do not believe” in it. They say all evidence is uncertain, that studies producing these findings are methodologically imperfect, and that the entire topic is contentious given uncertainties surrounding pheromones in humans.15
On the other hand, those who believe it—because they saw it with their own eyes, or even experienced it in their own cycle—also formulated an evolutionary hypothesis for why this was advantageous. The basic assumption is that in earlier times men were not nearly as urgent for sex as today (they also died more often), and that therefore it was advantageous for prehistoric women when occasionally there was a common “marketplace” from which future offspring emerged.
Evidence for pheromones as behavior-influencing substances is also supported by the fact that if a newborn and later infant is placed on the mother’s chest, it tries to crawl toward the nipples, where it detects food through these signals. If the nipples are washed perfectly clean, so that nothing can be smelled, the baby does not crawl. But it also crawls even when it has been fed artificial nutrition the whole time, which suggests it is not drawn by experience or by reward expectation in the form of good milk, but by something else, likely pheromones.
As for partner choice, there has already been mention of Wedekind’s experiment, and new findings indicate that while partnerships chosen under the influence of contraception offer no immune benefit, they involve lower frequency and lower sexual satisfaction, but better psychosocial coexistence. And then there is one more interesting message transmitted through pheromones: information about the degree of bodily asymmetry. The idea is that the greater bodily symmetry, that is, the smaller the asymmetry, the healthier the organism (this also relates to the positive assessment of beauty, whose pinnacle is a statistically averaged symmetric face as an image of health and the old Greek definition of beauty as harmony, to which nothing need be added).
The sense of smell is one of the very significant communication channels, yet truly undervalued today. The demands placed on its messengers have changed (our best evidence for this is the expensive shampoo-scented dog that then runs to roll in the nearest cattle shed), and we now prefer “pleasant aromas” over natural signals. Perhaps we feel better in this environment and have the impression that we have sufficiently satisfied our desires. The question is whether we have simultaneously frustrated our real needs. The declining European population indicates something is not right. Smell has a stable place in the reproductive process, and it would certainly be worth critically evaluating some civilizational demands that intrude into this area. It is also worth investigating the links between loss of smell and dementia and intervening at critical points.
And now finally, a little about human touch (it is apparently possible to write it this way—and that is also correct).
Long ago, way back in the 70s, I came across a study devoted to intriguing findings observed in healing experimentally induced skin defects in rabbits. At one workplace, in contrast to results found across the entire institution worldwide, rabbits healed significantly better and faster, even when no so-called miraculous healing agents were applied. The mystery was eventually resolved when it turned out that the caregiver on this ward loved the rabbits, cared for them, stroked them, and cuddled with them.
"Human beings need several strokes per day, otherwise the spinal cord dries out, wrote half a century ago, Eric Berne16 the founder of transactional analysis, and he put this sentence as a philosophical foundation of his teaching. Berne also pointed out that for newborns, infants, toddlers, and young children physical touches are essential, and only with the development of personality does a person become “less touchable,” with real cuddling replaced by verbal touches from the psychosocial domain. Berne was not the first in this regard, but as far as I know he was the first to assert that any touch, including a lack of stroking and cuddling, is more acceptable for any child than a state without stimulation.
Around the same time, Czech psychologists Josef Langmeier and Zdeněk Matějček,17 formulated their hypotheses on childhood deprivation, whose consequences they observed in the clinical and psychosocial condition of young patients from children’s homes. In places considered good and high quality because children had plenty of food and, with slight exaggeration, all four T’s (quiet, warmth, fluids, and relief of pain). But none of those who praised this had appreciated that the nurses, despite writhing about like ferrets, did not have time to pet the children, to stroke them, and to give them the needed and proper share of human touch. They did not realize this either, and our leading pediatricians, who fervently recommended artificial feeding and collective accommodation in nurseries (if possible all-week), either. The most zealous one even had the nickname “daycare and Nestlé”; in his later years that person became enlightened and wise and turned into an ardent promoter of breastfeeding.
The need for touch is probably a need of all living organisms. Most dramatically, however, it was proven in our closest relatives by American scientist Harry Harlow and his colleagues, who have been in a monkey purgatory since 1981 (a purgatory escaped by monkey-kind’s kindness) and, although the Society of Septics18 and the Nobel Foundation argued strongly in his favor, he will remain tied with wires from those experiments there for some time. What did he do? He took away the mothers of infant macaques (Macacus rhesus is a small narrow-nosed primate living in Asia) and put the helpless infants in a space containing two substitute “mothers”—dolls roughly shaped like adult females. The “soft mother” was a wire frame covered with soft plush fabric, while the “hard mother” was all wire but had two milk bottles placed where nipples would be.
Researchers were curious whether the infants would prefer food or soft arms. Soft mothers were truly more comfortable for the babies; after feeding they returned to them and cuddled with them. The females ran to them when they felt threatened or frightened.19 It should be added that these infants never developed into fully adult, psychosocially mature individuals. Bowlby’s attachment theory20 then fits like a perfect puzzle piece; it is broader than the topic of touch, but is inseparable from it. It also includes initial sensations from other senses; when Harlow added faces to the soft mothers to make them more similar to real monkeys, the infants removed them. They wanted their own mothers, even if insufficient, not some improved versions!
If we do not consider signals from the inner environment that reach the fetus through placental circulation (e.g., stress hormones), the tactile sensation of the whole tiny body in utero is actually the first complex sensory event. And let us not forget that skin develops from the same embryonic layer, the ectoderm, as the entire nervous system. The connection between them is bidirectional, and when adults develop, skin represents about 1.8 m² of area with many tactile receptors. As for typically human touches, we distinguish three types: touch from one’s own body, purposeful interpersonal touch with communicative meaning (a caress or a hug), and incidental unintended touch from another person, which we clearly distinguish from touch by another object.
But even here we have pleasant and unpleasant touch; there is a difference between running your fingers over velvet and over rough plaster. There is also a difference if C-fiber endings in the skin are stimulated gently or sharply. Our fingertips can distinguish surface quality even when anesthetized. This occurs through propagation of the stimulus via vibrations of different character, as has recently been proven.21 There are areas stimulating different somatosensory centers, there are erogenous zones that need not always be tied to preferred sites (lips, nipples, etc.), and through conditioned reflex it is possible to create an erogenous zone in different areas. Receptors are also not all of one type: they differ in sensitivity to touch, pressure, heat, pain, muscle tension, joint position, and motion detection. There are views that these sensory sensations should be processed discretely, but the brain processes them as a unified whole and evaluates them as tactile or haptic.
The complex sensation has four basic modalities: tactile, thermal, painful, and itchy, which travel into the central nervous system as a sub-system of a complex ensuring spatial and temporal orientation, discrimination, and baseline information guiding and accompanying tactile exploratory behavior. It also has an affective component, namely pain perception, but also the perception of friendly behavior from the environment through somatic feelings of pleasure and sensuality from emotionally colored touch.
Discriminative signals are conducted by fast A-beta fibers of peripheral nerves, while “rewarding” emotional signals are carried probably by unmyelinated CT (C-tactile) fibers with delayed awareness in the CNS. These fibers, discovered relatively late, were first found in facial regions; they do not occur in glabrous skin, even though many attempts were made to find them there.22
C-endings in hair-bearing regions of skin are highly variable, appearing as small circular or oval patches 1–32 mm containing one to several endings. Signal from them travels at a speed of one meter per second.23
Neurologist Oliver Sacks describes a woman whose deep sensation was completely disrupted and who became aware of her body only when she was zipping along in a cabriolet with significant speed, and the resulting wind traced the contours of her body.24 Deaf people can perceive music by placing their back uncovered. The Mexican neurologist Bach-y-Rita, whose motto was “I connect anything with anything,” used skin receptors to transmit visual information to the visual cortex of blind individuals by attaching to their backs a board containing 20 x 20 pixels that converted frontal-cam images into tactile stimuli.25 These then reached the visual cortex, and people equipped with this device were able to identify objects on the order of centimeters. Bach-y-Rita was convinced that blind people can see through their canes in a somewhat similar way via tactile receptors in the palm.
Touches carry important nonverbal messages. A handshaking grip informs us about the character of our counterpart and about our emotional state; a tap on the shoulder can convey praise, also encouragement, and we clearly recognize the difference. Caresses can have dozens of nuances, from gentle to passionate, just as hugging, which in addition reveals much about the psychosomatic condition of the actors. We touch each other to emphasize verbal communication, to share our feelings. Eye contact has a different meaning when accompanied by touch, because no other bodily sense captures more emotion than the tactile one. It is considered to be ten times stronger than words, and might be one laden with emotion and chosen in a sophisticated way. A psychologist should know that partner choice may be based on memory of the texture of a mother’s silk-like hair… That is what Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens wrote in 1932, authors of one of the earliest manuals on psychology of design and marketing.26 Memories of soothing tactile stimuli in childhood may underlie positive feelings when perceiving such stimuli in adulthood.
The touch domain can also carry negative charge. What associations does the word “untouching” evoke in you? Or the phrase: “Did it touch me?” Even the expression sounds neither positive nor pleasant when someone “is not in touch with reality.” This insight matches the fact that for autistic people, touch from another person is not always unequivocally a positive perception and raises the question of how much atypical or anomalous tactile sensations contribute to different behavior.
Of interest is the Midas touch effect.27 The Phrygian king Midas, besides donkey ears, also had foolish ideas. When Dionysus offered him, as a reward for a good deed, that he would grant any wish, Midas, in his greed, wished that everything he touched would turn into gold, and completely forgot that under such circumstances he would not even be able to eat. Not to mention that he turned his beloved daughter into a gold statue. Fortunately, the god pitied him and returned him to ordinary life. Still, Midas’s touch is a waiter’s trick. It has repeatedly been proven and experimentally verified that when a waiter/waitress somehow casually touches a guest—often without the guest even registering it—tip amounts are much higher. Interesting is that this does not work when the guest is touched by a stick or another object (which the guest also usually does not notice). How does this information about difference between touch by a person versus inanimate matter spread and find its target? Most projections go to the postcentral somatosensory cortex, some pleasant sensations to the orbitofrontal cortex, but the difference between touch by a person and by an object is hard to capture objectively without being observed.
Similar trials have been conducted in the operation of various services,28 most often in libraries, where librarians/librarians either touched a visitor during checkout or return, or did not. Visitors were then asked to report how friendly they found the staff. “Touchers” consistently received greater sympathy in all studies. Touch by staff during food tasting in a department store made customers much more likely to make a subsequent purchase of that food.29 Any request accompanied by touch is more often fulfilled. And so far that touch can calm agitated geriatric patients better than sedating psychopharmaceuticals, as shown by a recent meta-analysis of five clinical studies.30 Likewise, it calms newborns31 after a painful procedure. In perinatal care, focused touch with stimulation of relevant receptors32 can be used much more extensively. In geriatric and gerontopsychiatric care, visual and tactile stimuli are among the most highly preferred in multimodal stimulation.33
Interpersonal touch is a subject of interest to anthropologists, social psychologists, behaviorists, and cognitive researchers, and neuro-scientists; practical application interests designers, designers of communication networks (how to bring touch into virtual reality), ergonomics, and, obviously, a very large and not-very-scientific field of art, which often captures touch more precisely than all controlled experiments combined.
Researchers and engineers from the biomedical engineering departments of Georgia Tech and Emory University developed a “robotic nurse Cody.” One of them reported on a conference in 2011 as follows: We found that a patient evaluates a robot’s intention and responds accordingly. Although the robot touches him exactly the same way, if the patient believes the robot wants to clean his forearm, he experiences this neutrally; if he thinks it wants to comfort him, his emotions and feelings are much more negative. This is similar to human nurses, where instrumental touches are evaluated mostly neutrally or positively, whereas comforting touches are not so clearly positive. They also tested pre-treatment warnings from a robotic nurse and found that patients responded more favorably to situations where a verbal warning preceded treatment.
Anthropology gives us an interesting mosaic of permitted, tolerated, and taboo touches. Where French people still kiss each other on the face and even on the lips, Inuit people rub noses against each other, while Norwegians glare at each other from a distance, and Japanese people bow politely with hands up to knee level. Stroking a child on the head is an almost instinctive gesture among Europeans; in Thailand this touch is warmly discouraged, because it can be seen as an attack on the child’s soul’s seat. Two adult men holding hands would be seen in India or Saudi Arabia as two friends, while here as sexual partners. The saucy “double Brezhnev” of real socialist politicians has already fallen into oblivion (it is worth looking for in period documentary footage). Children touch each other more when they play outside than when they are indoors. Up to puberty, there are more touches between people of the same sex; in our region this ratio changes with adolescence. Men are more inclined to touch women than women men. It is certainly reasonable to wonder how much in this behavior is an appropriation strategy. It is also about the feelings of the one who touches. An interesting piece of work35 from consumer psychology shows that the “bottle effect” is not entirely foreign to us. A person buys what he or she has already held in hand, especially when visual choice is not very clear. Even when the choice is clear, the held object guides his or her actions. According to the authors, if we give a thirsty buyer a bottle to hold, he will buy the bottled beverage, while if we give a can, he prefers the drink in the can.
In the interesting book Between Us from 2006, Burton and Dimbleby36 compared, among other things, touch behavior of people in cafés in various parts of the world. Within one hour they recorded 180 touches in Puerto Rico, 110 in France, only two in the USA, and none in England. Social psychologists state that touches in our society are decreasing in favor of virtual communication, and its creators are trying to include tactile sensations in messaging, which for couples separated by large distances, in addition to transmitted images, reinforces the sense of belonging and feeling that they are together. For example, a “hug-shirt” evokes tactile sensations at the chest during phone calls. These experiments are still isolated and their results have mostly not been evaluated precisely.
Although virtual touches can motivate some actions just like real ones,37 it is clear that they cannot fully replace real, living touch, through which, for example, one can calm a patient before surgery or in homes for the elderly achieve better cooperation with gerontopsychiatric clients who “acted out,” did not follow the regime, refused food, and so on.38
Mathew Hertenstein and colleagues study the possibility of transmitting emotions through touch and its accuracy.39 In a room, a randomly selected “sender” and “receiver” are separated by a barrier blocking signals other than touch. The sender is given on slips of paper the names of twelve emotions—six basic and six derived or combined—which have to be communicated to the receiver by touching the forearm in any way they consider appropriate for that emotion. This research team demonstrated that at least six emotions can be reliably communicated this way: anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy.
Practically interesting are also findings from research on touches between partners in marriage. It is not surprising that the more mutual touch, the better the relationship; what people often do not know, however, is that this stability is underpinned by concentrations of the “trust hormone,” oxytocin. These are in inverse ratio, that is, the more of one, the less of the other, with stress hormone concentrations.
This brings us comfortably to the phenomenon of hand placement, which belongs to the oldest magical practices and is undoubtedly beneficial. Renowned physician and long-time head of the III Internal Clinic of the Faculty of General Medicine, Academician Charvát, described in a specific example his way of working. A colleague visited him and wanted to know where the mystery of his treatment success lay. Charvát took him to a room and showed him how he works with a patient. When they went outside, he asked the colleague to describe what he saw. – “You came there, you spoke to him, and then you left.” – “No, no,” Charvát corrected him. “You came, I took his hand, and then I spoke with him.”
The question is to what extent such behavior actually meets criteria of the Hawthorne effect, which attributes major improvements in people’s condition and performance to the fact that they were noticed and had attention and care registered in their surroundings, and to what extent this is something else. That is what proponents of programs with names like Healing Touch are convinced of. They claim that specific energy is transmitted. To skeptical observers this may sound like a pulled-by-the-hair story, but there are experiments that meet the strict criteria of scientific studies showing that touch truly can improve health. A little like a broken ant: He blew on his painful bump, stroked him on the forehead, and—poof—the healthy ant jumps out of bed in the morning.
If you enter the word “healing touch” on the medical scientific portal PubMed search, over 2,400 articles appear, mostly in peer-reviewed journals (so no tabloid). You will learn that handling (“touching”) reduces breast-tumor metastases in mice and improves immune response, although it does not affect the primary lesion. It is hard to talk about belief here… Unless those mice were Christians.
But let us stay with humans. A paper published in the February issue of Psychological Science in 2015, titled “Does hugging as a form of social support provide a buffer against stress?” states that people who received this social support, after exposure to a virus causing “the common cold,” had 32% lower illness incidence than people without this support.40
What follows from this? Go ahead and hug each other! The world is a beautiful place to live.
Author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák, CSc.
The article is from the author’s book Psychosomatic Primer.
Honzák R., Psychosomatic Primer. Prague: Vyšehrad, 2017. 336 pages. EAN: 9788074299124
After the successful book How to Live and Avoid Burnout and the book conversation with Renata Červenková We All Live in a Madhouse, a known psychiatrist, Radkin Honzák, presents another title devoted to the relationship between body and soul. As the author himself says, entering psychosomatics requires courage, but above all audacity—the courage to leave comfortable paths and the audacity to step onto the lawn where, for centuries, a warning sign maintained by the medical establishment in all political regimes has read DO NOT ENTER. Psychosomatic Primer is the result of his fifty-year—usually fruitless, as he candidly admits—search for the truth about health and disease. “Medicine is not simple when it comes to truth, because this discipline, like Russia, does not know where its limits lie. Only from time to time do a few individuals ask what, in fact, the tasks and goals of contemporary medicine are. It is an unpleasant question but a legitimate one.” Honzák tries to show that considering social and psychological factors, which are also very difficult to measure, and even, eventually, nearly ungraspable spiritual factors, as seriously as biological factors is an important addition to the medical view, which currently regards the human being primarily as a biological specimen.
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