Crossing Hands Technique Can Relieve Pain After Injury
by Chrysalis De Vera in Beauty & Wellness on Jul 05, 2011
A team of researchers from the University College of London suggested that by crossing your hands across your body after injury to the hand could relieve pain.
For the study, the team looked at and took a proof-of-concept study on 20 people and found out that when individuals cross their hands, the brain gets confused over where the pain has really occurred. They further explained that by putting the hands on the “wrong sides”, it can disrupt the sensory perception.
To test the study, the team “used a laser to generate a four millisecond pin-prick of pain to the participants’ hands without touching them.” They measured the study by getting the ranking of the intensity of the pain they felt. By using an electroencephalography (EEG), the electrical brain responses were measured.
The results the participant’s reports and the measurement of their EEG have shown that the “perception of pain was weaker when the arms were crossed over” the person’s midline, which is said to be the imaginary line running vertically down the center of the human’s body.
Dr. Giandomenic Iannetti, the lead researcher at the UCL department of physiology, pharmacology and neuroscience stated, “In everyday life, you mostly use your left hand to touch things on the left side of the world, and your right hand for the right side of the world.” He further explained, “This means that the areas of the brain that contain the map of the right body and the map of the right external space are usually activated together, leading to highly effective processing of sensory stimuli.”
Dr. Iannetti added that when you cross your arms, the maps are not activated together anymore which leads to less effective brain processing of sensory stimuli including pain, being perceived as weaker.
The team concluded that this new discovery might lead to new ways of treating pain, which exploit this confusion.
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