Touchy subject

There’s a new scientific review of dozens of studies of the effect of touch. Gosh, I wonder what it will say?!

It’s all very pro-touch results, because of course it is … because dozens of the studies reviewed come from the usual suspects, like the Touch Research Institute, a well-known source of amateurish, clearly biased touch research that has been inspiring feel-good headlines about the Power of Touch for my entire career.

This is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. While there is other data here, this paper is effectively just repackaging the results of all those junky little studies.

I don’t really doubt that touch is a good stuff, but …

• I don’t feel confident that touch is good “medicine.”
• I think we still know much less about it than this paper makes it seem like we know.
•  I don’t trust these conclusions.
• I sure wish we had better quality science about it.

Update: After sharing this on social media today, some highly competent critics have pointed out multiple serious flaws in this paper, and I’ve revised my assessment from “junky” to “utterly worthless.” As summed up by Annemarie Frank, doing my job for me:

“You can easily ignore this paper. This is quantity over quality. … The main problem lies in the almost non-existant risk of bias assessment, meaning that they just put together a huge list of ‘anything goes’ in terms of studies.”