Making a grab for an injured finger or toe like cartoon characters always do is the best way to fight pain, research has revealed.
Scientists from University College London have discovered that touching the area in your body which is hurting provides immediate, drug-free pain relief.
But it does not work if someone else touches the injury.
Lead researcher Professor Patrick Haggard said: "Interestingly, when we hurt our hand, we grasp it with our other hand but are typically reluctant to allow anyone else to touch the wound.
"Self-touch helps to give us the experience of our body as a coherent whole.
"We showed that levels of acute pain depend not just on the signals sent to the brain, but also on how the brain integrates these signals into a coherent representation of the body as a whole.
"Self-touch provides strong evidence to the brain about the correlation of sensory information coming from different parts of the body."
The effect is due to change in the way the body is represented in the brain.
Scientists used a technique called thermal grill illusion to study the benefits of self-touch in healthy volunteers who were made to feel pain.
In the experiment, their index and ring fingers were placed in warm water while their middle fingers were plunged into cold water. This made volunteers feel that their middle finger was painfully hot.
The pain experienced by the middle finger reduced most - by 64 per cent - when the technique was induced in an individual's two hands and then all three fingers on one hand touched the same fingers on the other hand.
The same level of pain relief was not evident when only one or two fingers were pressed against each other or when someone else's hand was pressed against the affected hand.
