Dear IMVA,

    In the two weeks since my last IMVA message I have worked on many subjects, only some of which I will publish in their complete form to the IMVA. I hope my readers can understand that I cannot publish everything I am writing for the books and for the online interactive training course in detoxification and chelation. I almost finished the third installment of the series on spirulina, this one concentrating on vitamins and minerals and their absorption; and a very interesting chapter called a Touch of Green whose first page reads: 

If we could only open these kids' hearts, many
of their problems with social isolation would vanish. 
                                                                   Dr. Jaquelyn McCandless

 

     This is important for increased movements into the depths of heart felt feelings increases our capacity to care and to love, as well as improves our overall state of physical health and sense of well being. Of course the heart McCandless is talking about here is far more than a biological physical pump that mechanically beats billions of times within the context of a lifetime. The heart is a vast electromagnetic generator and the frequencies that are radiated out by the heart change dramatically depending on what emotional state a person, or even a child, is in. The Heart represents our basic capacity to care and feel. It is far more important than any of us can appreciate; and the price paid when the heart closes, the force for life and health lost, is inestimable. The list of attitudes and characteristics that modern society contributes to this closing is very long and clearly starts in the birthing practices of modern medicine, and then in what happens quickly after when the pediatricians get their hands on the kids and plunge needles with poisons into them with glee. 

 

These children all have major immune problems and heart
compassion problems.  They are caught up in their imprisonment.
 Compassion is unknown to these children until they start to recover;
 they cannot reach out to others except to get their needs satisfied,
 and there is no appreciation - they do not know what that is. 
                                                                Dr. Jaquelyn McCandless 

 

     Just recently Dr. McCandless, author of Children with Starving Brains wrote saying, “These kids try to make sure nothing green ever passes their lips, and most hate vegetables, particularly green ones.” My first response to her was, “This translates to me to mean emotional intelligence shut down, separation, not wanting to be touched, not grounded, probably hypothalamic involvement.” So I asked her, “Does this make any sense to you? Does it fit in with your clinical experience?” Her response, “It does fit in, and describes autism to a T!” 

 

     After all my writing, and all our preoccupation with food, supplements, absorption, mercury, lead, arsenic, selenium, zinc and the picking of the right chelation agent, we are hard put to remember the very basics of life, light, color, warm touch and heartfelt feelings and sensitivity. What I was hearing from Dr. McCandless was only outwardly related to food. What I was hearing was these kids are deficient in green and are actually actively rejecting green, the color they need most. I have always known about the almost absolute separation that crashes down on these kids, putting them into a world of their own that can only be touched with extreme and persistent effort. The essence of an autistic child’s suffering as beings is seen in the pain of separation that cuts into their much needed bond of total love.  

     After writing this I took a sharp detour and felt an obligation to write about a case being brought before the United States Supreme Court, a case about Ayahuasca.  Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic tea central to the religious rituals of several Brazilian based churches.  It is being brought before the Supreme Court as an issue of religious freedom because the DEA wants to have it classified as a Schedule I controlled substance. I will present it from a medical and psychological perspective since I have not only personally experienced it in a positive sense but have also successfully applied it in a therapeutic sense in a very difficult situation with a very difficult client. I am slightly shy about publishing it because it is so far off my present mission and purpose but there are so few in my position who can speak out about this subject. I will publish it in the next day or so. Though for some this may be an important subject, in my eyes it is nothing next to the following: 

 

States that are reporting the highest levels of mercury emissions
 also have the highest rates of developmental disorders including autism.
                                                                                     Dr. John Palmer 

 

    This is from a yet to be published research essay by Dr. Palmer from Texas and should shake up the vaccine protagonists to a deadly threat to the nation's children. We can avoid doctors and their needles and even the dentists who still use mercury fillings but we cannot avoid the air we breathe.

 

   The main subject though for today’s IMVA communication is something entirely different and is a chapter from the book Ecstasy of Deliverance that follows the above chapter called A Touch of Green. It is with a very warm and happy heart that I introduce Therapeutic Healing Touch and how this work will be integrated into the IDCC - The International Detoxification and Chelation Clinic.

 

Mark Sircus Ac., OMD
Director International Medical Veritas Association
http://www.imva.info
http://www.worldpsychology.net
+55-83-3252-2195
www.skype.com ID: marksircus

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Therapeutic Healing Touch

 

     Autistic children tend to live in a much higher arousal state than other children, even though their behaviors often suggest otherwise. On average, a recent study from the Groden Center in Providence, R.I. shows that autistic children's heart rates are approximately 20-beats-per-minute higher than other children in control groups. Autistic children may appear to be calm and collected when they are actually in a heightened state of arousal.[i] Thus it is reasonable to assume that stress reduction would offer a positive support for children whose nervous systems are hyperactive. Normally there is a balance kept between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, but in long term chronic stress situations the balance is disturbed leading to stress related health problems.

     Very few people understand much about human perceptual levels and even less about the sensory difficulties autistic children labor under. Sensory disintegration may be the most difficult aspects of autism to understand, but it is arguably one of the most critical. Ellen Notbohm, co-author of 1001 Great Ideas for Teaching and Raising Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, writes that one of the most important things a child with autism wishes we knew about them is that their sensory perceptions are in chaos. Notbohm writes in total identification with the children, “This means that the ordinary sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches of everyday that you may not even notice can be downright painful for me.  The very environment in which I have to live often seems hostile.  I may appear withdrawn or belligerent to you but I am really just trying to defend myself.  Here is why a “simple” trip to the grocery store may be hell for me:

“My hearing may be hyper-acute.  Dozens of people are talking at once.  The loud speaker boom today’s special.  Musak whines from the sound system.  Cash registers beep and cough, a coffee grinder is chugging.  The meat cutter screeches, babies wail, carts creak, the fluorescent lighting hums.  My brain can’t filter all the input and I’m in overload! My sense of smell may be highly sensitive.  The fish at the meat counter isn’t quite fresh, the guy standing next to us hasn’t showered today, the deli is handing out sausage samples, the baby in line ahead of us has a poopy diaper, they’re mopping up pickles on aisle 3 with ammonia….I can’t sort it all out; I’m too nauseous. Because I am visually oriented, this may be my first sense to become over stimulated.  The fluorescent light is too bright; it makes the room pulsate and hurts my eyes. Sometimes the pulsating light bounces off everything and distorts what I am seeing -- the space seems to be constantly changing.  There’s glare from windows, too many items for me to be able to focus (I may compensate with "tunnel vision"), moving fans on the ceiling, so many bodies in constant motion.  All this affects my vestibular sense, and now I can’t even tell where my body is in space.”

     Sensory overloading is an unpleasant state of over stimulation in which too much information comes in through the senses at once for the brain to process. This may cause pain, nausea, shutdown, meltdown, or inability to comprehend further information. This state is common in autistic people, people with migraines, hangovers, certain forms of brain damage, sensory integration disorder, and others for whom sensory processing is difficult or unusual.

     Apart from the many physical reactions from increased stress from sensory overloads there are also a variety of behavioral and psychological reactions. In the general population depression and schizophrenia have both been linked to stress, as have a number of immune related illnesses, as well as the maladaptive coping behaviors that we see in autism. The psychosocial state of a person can and does have direct impacts on the immune system. Stress also has many different effects on the endocrine systems, including the well known fight or flight activation with its activation of the sympathetic adrenal-medullary (SAM) system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPAC) system, and other endocrine systems. The capabilities of the immune system are diminished after frequent activation of the autonomic nervous system in the case of chronic stresses from sensory overloads.

    It is important to remember that the endocrine system has close interactions with the immune system (Kudoh, Sakai, Ishiria, & Matsuki, 2001). Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), which incorporates facets of psychology, immunology, and neurosciences, is the emerging field that puts it all together, kind of a systems science that can wrap its hands around landscapes of disease and make sense of it all. In the book, "The Healing Brain", Dr Robert Ornstein said we should see the brain not solely as an organ of rational thought but also as a gland. The brain is not just an organ used for thinking; it is a vast chemical manufacturing complex, producing many potent hormones called neurotransmitters which can have powerful effects on our psychological and physiological health. Certain brain neurotransmitters have antidepressant and anti-anxiety effects and regulate appetite.

 

   The neurotransmitter released by the postganglionic neurons is noradrenaline (also called norepinephrine). The release of noradrenaline stimulates heartbeat, raises blood pressure, dilates the pupils and shunts blood away from the skin and viscera to the skeletal muscles, brain, and heart while it inhibits peristalsis in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. In short, stimulation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system prepares the body for emergencies: for "fight or flight". Research indicates the balance of neurotransmitters affect everything from sleeping, waking, love, stress, anger, optimism, pessimism, risk taking behavior, aggression, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, violence, anxiety, appetite etc. 

 

To touch is to be human. It makes us feel valued and cared for.
However, everyone is not comfortable with being touched.

 

    Many of the children suffering from ASD have a special difficulty with touch. In the preceding chapter a Touch of Green, we talked about autistic children actively rejecting green, an earthly warming color that they are in dire need of. Every parent of a severely autistic child knows about the almost absolute separation that crashes down on their kids, putting them into a world of their own that can only be touched with extreme and persistent effort. The essence of an autistic child’s suffering as beings is seen in the pain of separation that cuts into their much needed bond of total love and this is often expressed in a rejection of their deep need for touch. This chapter opens up a channel to reconnect directly with a child’s world even if they are totally cut off and actively violent about not being touched. 

 

     There are many ways to calm a person, many healing and medical treatments that can reduce stress, reduce sensory overload, slow the heart and help a person center. Acupuncture for instance is a medical treatment that has an immediate and powerful effect on the autonomic nervous system but for sensory overloaded autistic kids the last thing they want is more needles stuck in them. Color therapy is a non invasive method but this chapter is about therapeutic healing touch. In days gone by it was called Laying on of the Hands by nurses but today it is represented by Reiki, polarity therapy and Quantum Touch. The International Detoxification and Chelation Clinic (IDCC) is teaching therapeutic healing touch as a form of love and touch unified into a simplified healing system that will not only help calm kids down (even if it has to be applied initially when a child is sleeping) but will be helpful to the parents and the whole family. The most beautiful forms of touch possible are actually healing techniques. The most well known association to touch is healing. The bible often makes reference to the "laying on of hands" to heal the sick.

 

Touch can be a communication of love
 and is a most powerful way to communicate empathy,
 friendship, approval, affirmation and love to another.

 

     Modern science indicates that wise laws would promote more consensual, pleasurable, and harmless touching instead of discouraging physical affection. For instance, research by neurophysiologist James W. Prescott shows that insufficient amounts of physical affection may be a cause of high violence rates in the U.S. For many years, Dr. Prescott was a research scientist and administrator at the National Institutes of Health. He believes that touch deprivation is harmful to people's physical and psychological well-being. According to Dr. Prescott, handling and body contact are essential "nutrients" for the developing brain in humans and other animals. He says depriving infants of physical affection can cause neurological dysfunction, which leads to abnormal and harmful behavior. The undesirable conduct can include depression during infancy and violent acts later, autistic or withdrawn behaviors, inappropriate stimulus-seeking activities, and increased vulnerability to alcohol and drug abuse. So we do not want to let ASD children drift too far away from the world of touch.

 

Destroy the world of touch
 and you destroy the world of love.[ii]

 

    Americans, especially, suffer from a lack of intimacy with each other. Following a research project on touch around the world, social scientists rated the United States and Great Britain among the lowest touch countries studied. The "warmer" high-touch countries included Spain, France, Italy, and Greece. In America touching someone can actually be a federal offense. With the new sexual harassment laws many people are afraid to extend a warm hug or a friendly touch. In addition, with the increase in child molestation, we must guard our children's safety and teach them the difference between good and bad touching. Unfortunately for our children, that means their caregivers must be especially guarded in showing them affection, even when appropriate. Many studies reveal the potential for a great deal of psychological human damage that can occur at a very early age. Essential aspects of development, including, most importantly, sexual-affection development, is arrested or severely damaged when young children are deprived of affectionate touching. In the United States, some researchers estimate that only about 25 percent of children come from a functional home in which adequate attachment occurs due to sufficient levels of demonstrative affection. Perhaps a great part of the reason for this is, according to Robert W. Hatfield, “In its most rigid and fundamentalist form, the Judeo-Christian philosophy is staunchly anti-touch, antibody, anti-pleasure, and anti-sexual.”[iii]

 

     In writing the above I am in no way insinuating that a basic contributing cause of autism is a lack of touch, though in all probability, in some cases it could be a minor contributing factor. Dr. McCandless thoughts expressed about her daughter and other parents of autistic children in her book are worth repeating here:

 

I also know without doubt that Chelsey’s mother wasn’t a refrigerator mother. Elizabeth has three other happy, thriving, normal children and is a dedicated loving parent to all of her children. Over the years I have met hundreds of parents of ASD children and have been impressed by how the challenges of raising such a child often brings out the best in them. Their willingness and persistence to do everything possible to help their offspring proves that the parents of these developmentally challenged kids are among the most loving and capable of all caregivers.

 

     Regardless, this chapter stresses the touch factor and implores parents to employ touch with the same regard as they employ their Bio-Medical interventions.

 

Study after study demonstrates that for all mammals,
 receiving touch that is pleasurable, safe and appropriate
 reduces sickness, depression and aggressive behaviors.
                                                                                Dr. Ben Benjamin

 

     Skin hunger is a relatively new term that has been applied to the emotional response engendered by the loss of touch in our society. During WW II babies in orphanages failed to thrive and even died when deprived of human contact. In a classic study by Harry Harlow, newborn monkeys were taken from their biological mothers and given surrogates made of either wire or soft terry cloth. The baby monkeys consistently chose the soft mother even when deprived of nourishment. The need for bonding outweighed even the basic necessity of food.[iv] The hunger for touch is a real human need.[v] And though touch is physical, the need provides sustenance and anchoring for our emotional, mental and spiritual selves which all need to feel securely anchored in a world of love. This is totally true for babies and only slightly less so for adults even thought they have gotten used to a world and life of cutaneous deprivation.

 

    The hunger for touch is a real human need almost as important as food. And just as intimacy can be seen differently from love and sex, though we often combine the two, touch also is an activity in itself and can be a wholly satisfying experience as people who give and receive massage well know. The most important way we give love to a baby is through touch. For babies, and the rest of us, love is equated deeply with touch. The problem for adults though comes in with the intense association we make between touch and sex. Just like we fear intimacy many fear touch because sexual issues intervene in our consciousness. Any kind of attitude problem with sexuality will have a bearing on the person’s experiential world of touch.

 

Beings in union love each other, touch each other,
 need each other, and heal each other.

We are here on earth to touch each other physically,
 as well as spiritually, emotionally and mentally.

 

     Clinically, cutaneous deprivation, (the lack of touch) leads to a host of emotional, physical and developmental problems in young and old alike. Research has shown that there are distinct biochemical differences between people who experience touch and those who are severely deprived of it. Baby monkeys who are raised without comforting, nurturing touch do not have that source of security and assurance. They are easily overwhelmed by new experiences. Placed in an unfamiliar environment without a sense of safety, they simply collapse in hysterical screams. They cannot cope with challenging or threatening situations the same way that their touched and comforted cohorts can.     

                                                                                                      

     Physical affection is very important for wholesome touching puts us more in touch with the more beautiful parts of ourselves. Yet surveys have shown that overwhelmingly most people do not touch as much as they would like. Touch is an activity in itself, and is wholly satisfying, healing and a necessary life experience. Touch in the form of massage, affection, hugs, cuddles and plain pure tenderness diffuses emotional tension. It grounds the entire system and touches our souls. When a person has not been touched in a long while a simple and tender touch can send a person into a flood of tears for the heart feels the release of tension abruptly. Touch can be a communication of love and is a most powerful way to communicate empathy, friendship, approval, affirmation and love to another. Our inner spirits can nurture and share with each other most powerfully through caring touch and so it is important to teach this in sexual education which is really touch education.

 

More people in the world are starving
 for love and affection than for food.

 

     Our hands can also literally act as extensions of our heart. With our heart and hands working together we can reach directly into another person’s being through the surface of their skin. We can touch someone very deeply and when we do we are touched equally, the laws of giving and receiving work perfectly in the world of touch. The quality of our awareness makes all the difference and touching with good intent raises our consciousness for it is a sweet gift to give to another. Healing with the hands brings us to the most beautiful aspect of touch.

 

I have been using a form of Therapeutic Healing Touch for
 five months with noticeable results. He now asks me for “touch”
when he can’t calm himself, or when he has a headache or isn’t
feeling well. He nearly always wants my hands placed on his forehead.

 

     Other health benefits of physical affection are reported by Dr. Harold Voth, senior psychiatrist at the prestigious Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. He asserts: "It has been shown scientifically that people who are mentally run-down and depressed are far more prone to sickness than those who are not. Hugging can lift depression - enabling the body's immune system to become tuned up. Hugging breathes fresh life into a tired body and makes you feel younger and more vibrant.” Dr. Tiffany Field, director of the University of Miami's Touch Research Institute, gives a similar report. She describes a study in which children who received massage twice a week showed decreased amounts of depression. They also had significantly less anxiety than the study's control group. Dr. Field says, “The first sensory input in life comes from the sense of touch while a baby is still in the womb, and touch continues to be the primary means of learning about the world throughout infancy, well into childhood. Touch is critical for children's growth, development, and health, as well as for adults' physical and mental well-being. Yet American society is dangerously touch-deprived.”

 

   Touch deprivation and somasthetic stress (e.g., pain and "touch trauma") are rapidly followed by dramatic elevations in pituitary-adrenal plasma cortisol levels, while affectionate and soothing touch are associated with low serum plasma cortisol levels. Plasma cortisol levels have been shown to be a reliable physiological indicator of an organism's detection of environmental change or stress. Further, it has been shown that with chronic imbalances of plasma cortisol and other hormones and neuro-chemicals; there results abnormal brain tissue development as well as the destruction of previously normal brain tissue. In other words, frequent pleasurable touch results in positive changes in brain tissue, and chronic touch deprivation or trauma results in measurably significant brain damage.

 

     Beyond the study of body chemicals and neural tissue, it has been discovered that pleasurable touch is associated with enhanced learning, improved IQ, language acquisition, reading achievement, memory, general neonate development, preterm infant development, reduced self-mutilating behavior in the severely mentally retarded, expanded external awareness in autistic patients, improved geriatric health, decreased childhood clinginess and fears of exploring the environment, elimination of inappropriate self-stimulation and public masturbation behavior in children, and improved visual-spatial problem solving. Hospitalized patients recover more rapidly from injury and physical or psychiatric illness with attention to touch needs. Current thinking defines touch as the primary organizer (or, in the case of neglect and abuse, "disorganizer") of normal human development when viewed at biological, psychological and even social levels. A person's sense of self apparently originates in body awareness, body functions, and body activities that center around the sense of touch.

 

     Healing and health systems like Reiki, Polarity and Quantum touch basically have us touch a person without any movement at all of the hands. There is no pressure applied, no technique one has to learn like they teach in massage schools. It’s just the pure application of touch. Though each system gives different instructions, the end effect is similar. Essentially a person simply puts their warm hands on certain areas of the body and just holds them there. Reiki is very popular now and it is effective enough to get the attention of some medical people and hospitals that understand that it can help their patients through some trying moments. If we define touch as love we can easily see why. Love is healing and loving touch is wonderfully healing. When we touch with love and the highest inner intensions, which are taught by these healing systems, positive healing energy is transmitted. Something is passed on through the hands and what happens is often very beautiful. Scientifically we know that infrared is radiated out through the hands and this has its physiological effects.

 

Babies and young children benefit greatly from regular touch.
Stress, as measured by chemicals in the blood, is reduced. This results in
 babies crying less, sleeping more and being generally easier to soothe.

 

     We can explain the healing aspects of our hands in several ways. Certainly it is known that our hands are transmitters of far infrared energies. Perhaps we can simply say that our love comes through the warmth of them. Or the laws of harmonic resonance take over and there is an actual transmission of vibration. Like old grandfather clocks together on a wall, if you swing them all in different directions and come back to the room a little later, one will find them all swinging together in resonance. Somehow their rhythms get communicated without touching each other. With touch the transmission is more direct, and as such, powerful. And that, in the final analysis is what touch is all about. It is a transmission from one person to another and it always communicates something. So as the old saying goes, “reach out and touch someone.” We would be living in a different world if everyone touched more.

 

We need to be touched for needs that go untouched
 build up like potential energy ready to wreck havoc in our lives.
Touch is energy and moves energy.  

 

    Touch moves energy and depending on the type of touch, where the touch, and the motive and intent of the touch, the amount of energy that moves varies. The human body is electric and needs grounding through physical touch. The activity of the billions of nerve cells in the brain and the central and peripheral nerve systems are all highly electric in nature and all have their grounding points in the skin. When we touch or are touched we ground some of our surplus energies and this calms the nervous system.  

 

     Dr. Ben Benjamin wrote that, “The Netsilik Eskimos in Canada carry their babies—skin to skin—on their backs. Then mother and child are covered with layers of furs. The mother fully expects to be centered on her child at all times, and the baby hardly touches the ground before he or she is ready to walk. The attitude of this tribe toward its children is one of joy and welcome. This gives the Netsilik child a sense of security that lasts a lifetime. The Netsilik Eskimo is constantly threatened with the uncertainties of his ecosystem, yet stressful situations rarely upset his emotional homeostasis.” 

 

   Touch is a God given need that we never outgrow. Babies have a deep need for touch and if not forthcoming healthy development is interfered with. As adults we have a strong need to hold hands, be held in someone's arms, to hug, receive a nonsexual massage, have our face or arms stroked, be cuddled, caressed, etc. All of these things have actual physiological effects on our biochemical and bio-energetic systems. Brain wave activity is increased resulting in increased alertness for instance. The amount of insulin needed in diabetics is reduced, hormone levels increase and sleep patterns are enhanced. Simply put, humans thrive on touch. The hunger for touch is a real human need. And though touch is physical, the need provides sustenance and anchoring for our emotional, mental and spiritual selves which all need to feel securely anchored in a world of love.

 

The IDCC (International Detox and Chelation Clinic) is offering online courses in Therapeutic Healing Touch as an adjunct to its program of online education and detox and chelation consulting. Taught by Luciana Valentim the program is offered at a cost of 100 dollars. Theapeutic Healing Touch is a wonderful stand alone therapy for people with no previous training. It is in fact the easiest healing technique there is to learn though many doctors and nurses would benefit greatly from learning it. Even children can easily be taught how to use touch for healing and they tend to love doing so. The ability to work as a healer is a natural inate gift that we all have which is brought to the forefront with this training.

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[i]  SOURCE: Ivanhoe interview with Matthew Goodwin, research coordinator at The Groden Center, Inc.

[ii] As children one of the most dramatic emotional and unexplainable putdowns is centered around this “no self-pleasuring” stuff that comes from slapping a child’s hand away from their genitals. Anti masturbation taboos in society are destructive emotionally, mentally and spiritually to the young and creates great upset to the delicate emotional inner worlds of children. Any disturbance around the world of touch will eventually lead to severe disturbances of being later on. The Cherokee avoided much suffering and pain for they were able to integrate their sexual, sensual and spiritual natures into a sense of wholeness that led them to live more balanced lives in tune with themselves, others in their tribe, and with God (which they called The Above Beings) and nature itself.

 

[iii]Hatfield, Robert. “United States culture has created handy myths and philosophical constructs that merely serve our touch discomforts. Most parents are too easily convinced that they will "spoil" the child if they run to her "too quickly" when she cries or hold him "too often" or for "too long." We find a substantial percentage of parents who justify their homophobia by withdrawing meager affectionate touch from their toddlers and young children, stating, "Well, I don't want him to turn out homosexual." Some of our incorrect theories of the past are still with us, perhaps doing more damage than ever. Antitouch and antisexual societies have spawned fathers who panic if they happen to experience sexual arousal with their child squirming on their lap, and essentially punish the child severely by withdrawing physical affection from his daughter or son. Worse still is the father who acts on his sexual arousal, using the child as the defenseless object.”

[iv] In his original classic "wire mother" study, Harlow placed the touch-deprived monkeys in a large cage that contained two crude dummy monkeys constructed of wood and chicken wire. One dummy was bare wire with a full baby bottle attached. The monkeys had been regularly nursed from similar bottles. The other dummy was the same as the first, except that it contained no bottle and the chicken wire was wrapped with terry cloth. Placed in this strange environment, the anxious young monkey very quickly attached itself to the cloth-wrapped dummy and continued to cling to it as the hours passed. The infant monkey could easily see the familiar baby bottle no more than a few feet away on the other dummy. Many hours passed. Although growing increasingly distraught and hungry, the infants in these studies would not release their hold on the soft cloth of the foodless dummy. It was soon apparent that the young monkeys would likely dehydrate and starve before abandoning the terry cloth surrogate mother.

[v] Unwanted babies in the past were often deposited in institutions where modern antiseptic procedures and adequate food seemed to guarantee them at least a fighting chance for a healthy life. But the babies died, not from infectious diseases or malnutrition, but by wasting away from a condition called "marasmus." Sterile surroundings did not cure it; having enough food made no difference. These unwanted babies died from a completely different kind of deprivation: lack of touch. When the babies were removed from these large, impersonal institutions and placed in environments where they received physical nurturing along with formula, the marasmus reversed. They gained weight and finally began to thrive. Touch is vital for survival in the very young.