Laughter as Medicine

Some 20 years ago, Western medicine began to study the effect humor has on physical wellness. A man named Norman Cousins wrote a book, Anatomy of an Illness, which tells how watching comedic movies helped him recover from an illness doctors told him would be fatal.

Cousins, former editor of the US Saturday Review, stopped taking drugs for his painful condition. When the pain became unbearable, he would watch videos of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. From watching and laughing, he could get up to two hours of pain relief. This increase of pain threshold during and after laughing episodes has since been confirmed in studies.

For many years Reader's Digest had a small section called "Laughter, the Best Medicine." (Published monthly since January 1922, it is still the most widely read magazine in the world.)

Western medicine has decided that laughter boosts the immune system and lessens pain by boosting levels of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers. It also suppresses levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, lowers blood pressure, and has a beneficial effect on our overall well-being.

Eastern medicine has its champion as well. Dr. Madan Kataria has given us The School of Laughter Yoga. This is no joke, and is proving beneficial to thousands of people all over the world. To quote the good doctor from the most recent Laff-News newsletter:

"How much you breathe out defines how much you can breathe in. Exhalation is therefore much more important than inhalation. Laughing is the easiest and most powerful way to completely empty your lungs. The better you breathe, the healthier you become. Physical health and mental health go hand in hand."
http://www.laughteryoga.org/

Last year my father went into a nursing home. We all know how bad that can be. I watched as time went by and his face grayed and I grew more and more concerned. One of the things we did to support him as a family was go every Sunday morning and have our own church service with him in his room. No, we didn't do laughter therapy, but what we did do was sing hymns. That was something we could do with him to pull him up out of himself. I noticed that, as he sang along with us, his color improved.

I don't attribute that to any miracle brought about by hymn singing, but to the fact that he was inadvertently forcing himself to breathe more deeply. The added oxygen, just from that small bit of singing, brought color to his face and light to his eyes. This is a personal example of those we can find scattered across the internet.

There is a Dr. Michael Christensen who founded a program called "Clown Doctors" in 1986. "The Big Apple Circus Clown Care (SM) hospital clowning program brings laughter and joy to the bedsides of acutely and chronically ill children year round. "
http://www.goodnewsbroadcast.com/clown.html

These "Clown Doctors" are specially selected and trained professional performers who are trained to work in the sensitive hospital environment. They are there to help demystify and simplify complicated medical procedures by performing their own "highly technical" clown medicine that includes "red-nose transplants, kitty cat scans, chocolate milk transfusions, plate spinning platelet tests, and prescriptions of laughter."

Presently, this program has expanded to seventeen cities. These host hospitals are located across the country in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Miami, New Haven, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Big Apple Circus' Vaudeville Caravan program, serving the isolated elderly, using the same skills as in the children's hospitals. They use a different technique than with the children, but they go room to room, making people wake up, take notice, and participate.

Clowns have worked in hospitals since the time of Hippocrates. The entire front page of Le Petit Journal of 13 Sept 1908 is given to a drawing of clowns working in a hospital.

Dr Patch Adams put on a red clown nose as he worked in hospitals 32 years ago, and is now a very sought after teacher and presenter all over the world. He regularly visits Russian orphanages and hospitals, and he has started the Gesundheit! Institute.
http://www.patchadams.org/speakers/

Australian Dr. Peter Spitzer is the Chairman of The Humour Foundation's Clown Doctor program. This program is operating at excellent standards and is well integrated into the Australian health care system nationally. Lack of funding is always a problem, but Dr. Spitzer has plans for the establishment of an Annual International Clown Doctor Scholarship which would allow cross-cultural and artistic performance exchange.
http://www.clowndoctors.com.au/

The Fools for Health clown-doctor program began work in July 2001 with four clown doctors working on the adult in-patient rehabilitation unit at the Windsor Regional Hospital in Ontario, Canada. It is also based on the Big Apple Circus Clown Care Unit.
http://web2.uwindsor.ca/fools_for_health/index.htm

All over the world, people are using laughter as medicine. We know that exercise is good for us, but doing exercises can be considered work, while laughter is fun and therapeutic at the same time. So the next time you're feeling down or a bit under the weather, take the time to laugh out loud. Your health IS a laughing matter.