“Humor can help relieve stress and discomfort for seriously ill patients.” — Alan Patureau, Palm Beach Post Cox News Service

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” — Proverbs 17:22

Laughter Can Be the Best Medicine

    Five years ago, Fiona Page was accidentally blinded during surgery to clear a blood clot in her leg; but the former history teacher, 49, was undaunted. She co-founded the Atlanta Story Telling Festival and appears professionally throughout Georgia. She also enrolled in Atlanta comedian, Jeff Justice’s, Comedy Workshop.

    “I’ve been blind for five years; and blond for over 40 years,” she said in her monologue at the Punchline Comedy Club on the workshop’s graduation night, “Please ask me if I’m depressed about being handicapped. No; I like being blond!”

    Page learned firsthand in the class what a growing number of physicians, psychiatrists and nurses assert: Laughter is good therapy for illness and stress. Like exercise, it releases endorphins, those little peptide cells that fight pain and encourage a sense of well being.

    Many hospitals and cancer centers are beginning to take humor seriously, too. Some have “laugh rooms” where patients can check out comedy videotapes, audio tapes, books, cartoons, games and toys. Videos in constant demand at Northside Hospital in Atlanta include: Back to the Future, Airplane, candid cam era, Saturday Night Live, and movies starring Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy.

    “If our patients can get beyond the horror, we feel they can benefit from humor,” says Betty Castellani, Cancer Center Director, at De Kalb Medical Center outside Atlanta. She also leads a weekly support group, at which cancer outpatients watch funny films, and are encouraged to get up and tell jokes about their ill nesses. No wonder some proponents of laugh therapy jokingly refer to it as “ho-ho-holistic medicine.”

    Frank Luton, 5oyear-oldtraining director at BellSouth Corp., attends some of the DeKaIb sessions. He took Justice’s comedy workshop too. Four years ago, Luton was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent four surgeries and two months of radiation treatment at Saint Joseph’s Hospital. “This didn’t fit into my life-plan at all; I reacted very negatively,” he says. Later he realized, “God had given me a wake-up call.” He vowed to turn his depression into something dynamic. So, when his time came to be in the Punchline spot light, he was able to make fun of his plight:

    A hospital nurse declined his request for two Tylenol for a splitting headache. She would give only what his doctor prescribed — morphine. Another night he pushed the button, but the nurse never came. “The only way I could get help was by dialing 911.”

    “It’s damn difficult to laugh when told you have cancer,” says Luton. “But Jeff’s workshop taught me to laugh at myself, and it was very therapeutic.”

    Castellani says that even among dying patients, humor can relieve tension and anxiety. “It’s a great outlet for anger and allows a temporally escape from reality, from the fear of dying,” she says.

    Popular interest in the therapeutic value of laughter dates to 1979 when Norman Cousins wrote his famous book The Anatomy of an Illness. The longtime editor of The Saturday Review, who died in 1990 of a heart attack, wrote about coping with a painfully crippling disease.

    “I made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect, and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”

    Tests showed his inflammation subsided a bit alter each laughter session watching Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers and his other favorites. He likened laughing's physical and psychological effects to “internal jogging,” a kind of sedentary aerobics.

    Since then, studies at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center and elsewhere have demonstrated that making patients laugh significantly increases their ability to deal with pain.

    “I don’t know whether we’re going to prove that humor cures a disease,” says Dr. Richard law of his studies at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California, “but I think laughter makes people more functional, more quickly.”

    Dr. William F. Fry, a psychiatrist affiliated with Stanford University, says laughing 100 times a day is equivalent to about 10 minutes of rowing. He says when laughter releases endorphins in the brain; it enhances blood flow and thus may speed healing, reduce inflammation and stimulate alertness.

    “During a hearty laugh,” says Dr. Marvin Herring of New Jersey’s School of Osteopathic Medicine, “The diaphragm, thorax, abdomen, heart, lungs, and even the liver, are given a massage.”

    Even more obvious are the effects that laughter has on respiratory and cardiovascular functions. An article in the April 1992 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association points out:

    ‘Laughter disrupts and increases the normal breathing rhythm. Heart rate, blood pressure and muscular tension increase, as does the amount of oxygen in the blood. This helps deliver nutrients to tissue throughout the body. When laughter subsides, these levels drop temporarily below normal, leaving the person very relaxed. Hence the expression ‘weak with laughter.’”

    This sense of relaxation helps counter heart disease, high blood pressure and depression. A good laugh provides limited muscle conditioning. And it helps break the pain-spasm cycle common in muscle disorders. Laughing can increase the immunoglobulin in your saliva, helping your immune system fight off colds, flu and sinus trouble. Learning to think funny has turned around the lives of dozens of Justice’s students. “Far more people use the course as therapy than to become stand-up comedians,” he says.

    Bonnie McDaniel, 41, who suffers from an arthritis related muscle disease, graduated last June. She says she had her best summer in years, and she uses her walker less. “I’d better laugh, because this thing ain’t going away,” she says.

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