Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/1013756
74 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k s e p t e m b e r / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8 weight 47 percent more than those infants not being massaged and with the same food intake. They were also able to leave the hospital six days earlier than their nonmassaged counterparts. For their work, Field, Kuhn, Schanberg, and laboratory technician Gary Evoniuk were honored with the Golden Goose Award in 2014, a national honor recognizing the "tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting seemingly obscure studies that have led to major breakthroughs and resulted in significant societal impact." 3 The award description reminds us why Field's work is so important: "Dr. Field did not set out to develop infant massage as a national health-care cost-savings measure. Her goal was to help save and improve the lives of babies born too sick or too soon to face the world outside of the NICU, and she was very successful in that regard. Her success did, however, also result in enormous cost savings. A recent analysis estimates that these savings amount to about $10,000 per infant, resulting in a nationwide annual health-care savings of $4.7 billion. Infant massage therapy is now used by close to 40 percent of NICUs nationwide, a number that is steadily increasing." 4 To this day, Field says that 1986 study remains the research she is most proud of. 74 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k s e p t e m b e r / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 8 preemies sucked on pacifiers, they gained weight and were discharged earlier. So, we eventually argued that if they could gain that much weight by stimulating the inside of their mouths, they could gain more by having their entire bodies stimulated. That led to massaging them." At the same time, Field's personal experience with her own child's premature birth in 1976 gave her a lovable "guinea pig" on which to test her theories. Not familiar with professional massage at the time, but well aware of the tactile requirements infants need to thrive (as evidenced in the touch-deprived children discovered in understaffed and abusive Romanian orphanages), Field set to work giving her daughter daily massage. But the path to her consummate work needed one more step to be complete. When Field and her colleagues found that growth hormones were stimulated when rats licked their pups, the way became clear. "We found that some researchers had tried stroking the [NICU] babies, but did not affect their growth. It was because they were lightly stroking them. When we applied pressure— moved the skin—the babies gained weight and were discharged from NICU earlier." The pressure, she says, is ultimately the key. Field and fellow researchers Cynthia Kuhn, Saul Schanberg, and several others published their results in Pediatrics, 2 and new ground was broken for the massage community when we learned that with massage treatment for three 15-minute intervals each day for 10 days, premature infants were able to increase their body What's on your reading list? "PubMed. It is a great search engine that gives me current research on new massage therapy studies. The literature increases abut 100 percent each year, so it's hard to be current." What are some of your hobbies? "My life is a hobby." Why are you researching yoga? "I think it is a form of self-massage. That's why I do yoga every day. I knew that massage helped children with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which we had studied, and I learned that yoga has very similar effects as massage therapy when we compared the two." Why are you in the Guinness Book of World Records? "Johnson & Johnson just sponsored a teaching tour that resulted in the record for teaching infant massage to 400 midwives all in the same room, earning the designation as the World's Largest Infant Massage Lesson. They used dolls for the class." Support for Touch Research Institute For more information about how you can help the Touch Research Institute, visit www6.miami.edu/ touch-research/Donate.html.