YOU’VE GOT TO LAUGH! Richard J B Willis
The Bible got in first with, ‘Being cheerful keeps you healthy …’ (Prov. 17:22. GNB), and modern medicine is confirming its value to our health. Cheerfulness has both psychological and physical advantages to well-being.
Hospitals concerned with relieving anxiety in patients waiting to undergo tests and operations have found humour to be the best prescription. Since children are often more frightened than adults, hospitals have introduced visits by clowns, and have even renamed some of their procedures.
A group of New York hospitals have a team of 35 clowns – the Big Apple Circus – which has been visiting the wards for nearly two decades. As a result the clinical vocabulary of the children’s wards has changed. The children are delighted with the thought of ‘kitty CAT scans’, ‘chocolate-milk transfusions’, and ‘red-nose transplants’, thus alleviating their fear of the real thing.
Laughing is more than merely exercising your chuckle muscle, although as one writer says, ‘Your daily laugh total should equal at least 15 chuckles a day or you are under-laughed’. Research into the effects of laughter shows that it increases the pleasure hormones (endorphins), which in turn increase the volume of oxygen in the blood, speeds the heart rate, decreases blood pressure and relaxes the arteries, and you do not have to pay for the treatment!
Such is the interest in laughter medicine that a new speciality has been added to the therapeutic repertoire – gelotologists. These laughter specialists are studying the above effects of laughter as well as its effect on the respiratory and immune systems. No, don’t laugh, these are serious studies! Laughter also strengthens social bonds and helps to relieve stress in other areas of life than hospital anxiety.
Laugher is infectious, it appears, since hospitals around the world offering humour and clown facilities have increased. One, Le Rire Medecin, in Paris started in 1991 and employs 48 doctors in 11 hospitals and have ‘treated’ around 40,000 children per year. Now laughter medicine is being taught in the UK by the Happy Training Company based in Bradford. The course, started 3 years ago, at Wyke Manor Community College has got off successfully as interested individuals volunteer for this ‘new’ approach to medicine.
The organisers of the Bradford course look forward to the day when ‘doctors on scooters with hooters’ will be a familiar sight at hospitals. Before they are finished these gelotologists will have us all in stitches! One hospital has started already. A sign outside the gate says, ‘Guard dogs operate at this hospital’!