Photo: Community Empowerment Lab
Massage therapy has long been part of traditional Indian newborn care, often entrusted to female caregivers who massage newborns with locally available oil. “When you massage a baby, the oil lubricates the skin and relaxes the muscles,” says medical research scientist Vishwajeet Kumar, founder of Community Empowerment Lab in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He was on a team in the 2000s that included the present associate dean for maternal and child health at Stanford Medicine, Gary Darmstadt, who has identified sunflower seed oil as the one oil that moisturized infant skin, kept it hydrated for long periods, and even reduced sepsis and neonatal mortality rates of hospitalized premature infants. He led a community-level clinical trial with over 26,000 infants which recorded a 52% reduction in neonatal deaths among very low-birth-weight infants who received SSO therapy, compared to those who received mustard oil massages, and has developed a sunflower seed oil with optimal amounts of linoleic acid for infant massage. In north India, neonatology professor Suksham Jain is conducting a clinical trial which suggests that babies who have been massaged gain weight faster than ones on whom the oil is simply being applied.
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