The Crown has killed shake hands and hug. What will replace it?

Dr. Mark Sklansky has always hated shaking hands. He can think of to welcome a dozen of the best ways for patients compared to the bad exchange. “The hands are warm, wet, and we know very well the transmit disease,” says Sklansky, chief of pediatric cardiology at the hospital UCLA Mattel Children. “It is a phenomenal vector for disease.” He also tried to avoid this form of greeting, because he knows that some patients do not want to shake hands for religious or cultural reasons, but forced the feeling, when his sticks to a doctor’s hand. For a long time, but its fringe anti-handshake was thinking. The handshake is a part of the doctor-patient relationship rooted happens 83% of the time, according to an analysis of 2007 more than 100 outpatient visits videotaped. Sklansky was to take even a nervous stand against the popular movement. “I honestly did not want to admit it for the longest time to anyone,” he says. But he argued in a 2014 document, Sklansky and his colleagues that the hands can spread in health care shaking pathogens and viruses, and that health care providers can, keeping your hands to help patients safely. The blowback was swift. Doctors snorted that close to free hands of the already fragile without spreading the disease, thank you very much would erode. Physician-patient relationship that the reception was irreplaceable, and it was possible to shake hands and wash “A lot of people laughed at the idea,” said Sklansky. “But now, people are not laughing.” Handshakes are only one form of contact that has evaporated during the global epidemic crown. So they hugs, high five, fist bumps, patting his back, shoulder and shaking all the little points of contact that we do when we’re closer than six meters away. And as Americans are out of their homes and closer together to make costumes once their social life again, experts are betting that a certain level of social commitment to disappear permanently, ending after the pandemic. “I do not think we should ever again and again shake hands, to be honest,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci in April podcast interview with Wall Street Journal. If social touch more than temporarily disappear, there is no consensus on what will replace it. But one thing is somewhat controversial: interactions social atmosphere around really strange to start. “How do we get out of quarantine and isolation, I think we’re a group of people shake hands they see and some people do not want it with a twist pile 10 feet,” Aaron Smith, says a psychotherapist and teacher in the School of Social Work in Renison University college in Canada, which published the advantages and pitfalls of handshakes in a magazine article in March explored. “It will be very embarrassed, as people try to figure out how to greet someone, to make this welcome someone professionally, as his friend for the first time.” This uncertainty can influence these relationships. “We are starting to be much more interactive and types of family conflict made to see,” says Smith. If a co-worker tried a handshake or your mother is in the arms, and peel off “it is of some rather large ripple effects in terms of relational dynamics that we see to be.” Because, even if you are being embraced outside of intimate relationships they despise or hate shaking hands completely lose social commitment, as we have during COVID-19 still feel it is not normal. “Suddenly we take all these touches can be seen that are missing,” says Juulia Suvilehto, a researcher at the University of Linköping in Sweden, studied social ties. “It ‘s as if there was this strange gap.” Acquaintances touching and foreigners have an evolutionary purpose. Language is the most obvious way that people promote social bonds with each other, but the touch does something similar. “We know that social music non-human primates with the use of a lot,” says Suvilehto care. “The larger the group, the more time they spend on it. It ‘a way to make allies and maintain relationships.” Touch also helps to reduce aggression among people, says Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine. “When you’re touching someone’s social, it’s very difficult to be aggressive about it.” On the contrary, “if you separate two monkeys and you can see, hear and smell each other, but you can not touch, if you remove the Plexiglas,” they kill one another virtually. During his career, the field is said to have so strongly observed in American society moving fall that she thinks she has to find something else to the study. Social has been embraced largely determined by Me Too moving to the sidelines and smartphones took care of the rest. About a year ago, she and her students to look at people as recorded at the airport of departure gates were and how often touched. He expected to see people together with their closest companions and throw their arms around each other. “We were all touching can not be seen, even among couples and families traveling together,” says Field. “Everybody was. On the phone … just scrolling and SMS and games” Field believes touch Back socially bounce is suspected, the elbow bump is the handshake, but move it hopes will touch back to families who spend in quarantine more time together. Welcome Touch is good for your health; It has already been shown to reduce stress and triggers the release of oxytocin, which is called “love” hormone and aid ties and proximity to promote. Pleased to meet you? The handshake is probably the most common form of social commitment in the United States, and is thought by many centuries occurred before and the certainty that no party had a gun. “It signals trust and cooperation,” says Sanda Dolcos, who runs with her husband, Florin Dolcos at the University of Illinois, a neuroscience research lab. In the team of imaging studies “you can actually see the brain areas that are involved in processing rewards is activated when people shake hands,” said Sanda. Even watching the people shake hands to increase in the reward centers of the brain activation enough, their research has shown. “The expectations are with respect to social or physical interactions are so hard-wired,” Florin says he did not expect the handshake disappearing completely after a pandemic control. Just as Smith. “I would be surprised if a year from now, there was no more,” says Smith. “I would be in any case, because of shocked how ordinary and universal. I do not see away overnight.” But I think that will change. People could keep handshakes and hugs to those who are closest to them and that they have more confidence and the development of new greetings, to include no contact with the skin-to-skin to share those further outside of their environment. There are many alternatives: the elbow bump, a foot tap, a namaste bow gesture, a quick nod of the head or tilting the head, put a hand to her heart. It is not clear which of these will prevail, if any. “We see a wide range of values ​​and beliefs and political opinions on all these things like,” says Smith. “Underlying all these are layers upon layers of beliefs and professional and personal values ​​come from childhood, learned from our religious orientation of the messages that we have in school.” We do not all go to the same solution. But research has shown that it is possible to embrace some degree to non-free alternatives. Sklansky, the Pediatric cardiologist and anti-handshake Crusaders, conducted an experiment to see if you can eliminate the handshake in two of the neonatal intensive care unit at UCLA, where he discusses some of the most vulnerable patients. In a study in 2017, he describes the free handshake areas by posting signs that two hands clasping me to try several cross verbal greetings and encourages doctors, nurses and residents of the facility. While about one-third of resistive suppliers in particular were doctors, and especially for men, almost all the families of patients for were not affected by their physician to be. Less than 10% said they wanted to be greeted with a handshake. The vast majority preferred place when health professionals have seen in the eye, smiled, spoke with their name or asked for their welfare. The handshake has long been a way for doctors to provide quick relationship with their patients, but something is non-contact time necessary not only because of the pandemic, but also because of the rise of telemedicine. “We are not a kind of digital handshake,” says Gregory Makoul, founder and CEO of the patient Sapienza, a company that Health Organization patient engagement and communication will help improve. Makoul co-author of the 2007 study on the spread shaking hands and health care, but he believes that words can also build a bond. “Do you have the kind of conversation that makes this link.” The future of social touch is here If someone if you’re walking away to form through a screen to zoom in conversation or have the feeling that personal connections are more difficult are not alone. “They have many more verbalize things you might say usually with a twist,” says Suvilehto. Embracing comforting positioning or a hand on his shoulder demands often feels lighter and more natural than to find the right words. Forced able to express these feelings make us better communicators. “But the other option is that people just stop talking about emotions to communicate,” says Suvilehto. can be as a substitute social commitment to the language, you may have to communicate with words, feelings that you transmit once through physical contact. Welcome Sklansky in the world that has been around the handshake for years under way long, detailed. “When people arrive, I just say, look, I prefer not to shake hands. I do not explain to a good Idee.’Ich various reasons why, and I speak of paper,” he says. He opts for the namaste gesture. “People smile and think that it’s kind of fun,” he says. “But I think it’s something that over time people can get used to this.”
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