The Power of Human Touch

I believe in the power of the human touch – its power to bridge gaps between people due to language, culture, race, ethnicity or education, and its power to heal.

One morning, I was arriving to my clinic in a teaching hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. A medical resident calls me after I arrive to tell me she is seeing a patient in the emergency department. He is a 22-year-old man, suffering from fever and confusion. She explains he was recently diagnosed with AIDS. After examination and initial testing, we suspected he suffered from a serious fungal infection of the brain.

For the next three weeks I saw this young man every day. After 4 or 5 days of treatment, his fever subsided and he started to speak. After going to India as a medical student I learned to read Devanagari, the root alphabet of both Hindi and Nepali. Admittedly, my Nepali language skills are self-taught and under developed, however, I began communicating with this young man stumbling through my broken Nepali and his broken English. Between the two, we could speak about most things.

I have learned that one of the most prized privileges of being a doctor is the relationship cultivated with your patients. To understand the illness – how the medical condition has an effect on the patient’s life, well-being and physical state is enormously important, and often missed in all the details of medicine.

Through my work with people living with HIV in Nepal, I have learned that there are still places where HIV is stigmatized and people face discrimination. Patients can become isolated– some quite literally when family, friends or healthcare workers will refuse to touch or care for them in fear of getting HIV.

I have directly witnessed the power of human touch – I have developed strong bonds with people who are completely different from me, from various cultures, languages and ethnic backgrounds. These bonds developed because human touch, a smile and a helping hand are universal.

The day that young man left the hospital, I sat by his bedside explaining what was going to happen next. As I was getting up to leave, he grabbed my hand tightly. As I turned to look at him, I heard his mother quietly sobbing. He told me, “I know when I came here I was dying. You have given me a new life. You treated me differently than the others…I feel like a person again.”

Stigma and discrimination against those living with HIV still exists in this world and they face de-humanization. They are seen as their disease, not as a person. I have realized that my willingness to treat them as I would anyone else, with compassion and human touch helps to reverse the effects of stigma and discrimination. Something as simple as a hand on the shoulder or holding a patient’s hand when they are in pain or upset can make all the difference. They feel human again. Just as human contact can strengthen the human connection from the doctor to the patient, he also chose to reach out for my hand – proof for me the power of such an action. Although, there can be a great gap between us, the concern, the human touch and the care of another can bridge the barriers of culture, language or nationality.