Babies born prematurely are at risk and require a lot of care in order to grow, gain weight, and thrive. Work funded by the National Institutes of Health, starting in the 1970s, led to the discovery of a surprisingly effective treatment: the simple act of touch, through 15 minutes of massage therapy three times a day, can lead to a 47% increase in the baby’s weight.

The story starts with Prof. Saul Schanberg’s research group at Duke University. They knew that when rat pups are separated from their mothers, they grow less well than pups that aren’t separated. They wanted to find out what made the difference. The mother’s milk? The warmth of her body? Her comforting smell? They gradually ruled all of these out and came to a surprising conclusion: it was her touch. Stroking the pups with a gentle camera brush, in a motion that mimicked how the mother licks them, allowed the pups to thrive.

Following up on this research, Prof. Tiffany Field’s group at the University of Miami asked whether similar touch therapy with humans would have a similar beneficial effect. They found that it did, and the positive effect was big. Fast forward years later, and massage therapy for preterm babies in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) is now commonplace, helping many thousands of babies grow to be thriving children.

In addition to the emotional toll of having a baby in the Neonatal Intinsive Care Unit (NICU), care for babies in the NICU is expensive. The use of massage therapy to help babies thrive and successfully leave the NICU was estimated in 2014 to save about $10,000 per baby, for a total savings in the U.S. of about $4.7 billion dollars every year.