Laughter and humor may be a key to staying healthy, healing faster, and more. Patch Adams and the Gesundheit! Institute pave the way for laughter therapy.

Laughter as medicine – funny concept, isn't it? Though it can be difficult to define what exactly makes humor funny, laughter has long been considered helpful to the healing process. Substantial research indicates that humor and laughter play a role in exercising the internal organs, getting more oxygen to the brain, boosting endorphins, strengthening the immune system, and improving a patient's optimism and outlook about his or her recovery.

We've all heard about the man who cured his deadly illness by watching Marx Brothers videos, and the new interest in "laughter yoga". It turns out there may be some truth to the suggestion that we can heal ourselves with humor… the most natural medicine of all.

Laughter, Internal Exercise and Endorphins

The most obvious benefits of laughter – though by no means the only ones – are the physical results:

• Laughter exercises the diaphragm and the cardiovascular system, improving breathing and oxygen flow as well as creating the same levels of endorphins (natural mood-elevating and pain-killing chemicals) as exercise.(1)
• Laughter has been shown to improve pain tolerance and to boost the immune system.(2)
• Unlike more invasive therapies, laughter therapy is cheap and has no harmful side effects.

Patch Adams – "A Loving Human Interchange"

Hunter 'Patch' Adams, M.D., the subject of the 1998 Robin Williams movie "Patch Adams", based his concept of the Gesundheit! Institute and his Gesundheit Model on the principles that health is more than "normal lab values and clear x-rays"(3) and that a "loving human interchange"(4) is the most important ingredient in medical care and healing.

Humor and laughter play a vital role in Patch Adams' Gesundheit Model. "In our normal, serious world with somber medical environments," he writes, "(even though no research supports being serious and thousands of research papers encourage joy and humor as healing), we saw no contradiction in feeling that a hospital could also be an amusement park."(4) Adams' "amusement park" welcomes natural and allopathic therapies of all kinds, as well as clowns and laughter treatment.

Humor, Laughter, and the Cure for Everything

As Patch Adams says, innumerable studies have established a link between humor, laughter, good mood and recovery from illness.

People who don't laugh often or are usually in a bad mood may be what psychologist Eysenck called "the disease-prone personality"(5) – more likely to get sick and less likely to heal than their more optimistic peers or other patients with the same diagnosis. The reverse, of course, is also true.

Mood can have a profound effect on health in the long term. A person's attitude about his disease can affect his chances of healing and the rate at which his health improves.(5)

Like most natural remedies, laughter is not an absolute cure – but it can be helpful in a surprising number of health situations. Where it doesn’t change health issues directly, laughter can still be helpful in decreasing pain and easing tension.

So next time you're home sick with a cold, forget the chicken soup and cough syrup! Take a day off and try for some classic laughter therapy with your favorite comedies.

Reference:

(1) Lawrence J. Peter and Bill Dana, The Laughter Prescription, 1982.

(2) Heather Elliot, "Humour in the Hospital", The Canadian Nurse, Vol. 9 Iss. 7, Aug. 2002.

(3) Patch Adams, "Love, Humor & Healing", Good Medicine, #39, Fall 1994.

(4) Patch Adams, "Vision for Building a Free Hospital", The Gesundheit! Institute, accessed January 31, 2008.

(5) Gregory J. Boyle and Jeanne M. Joss-Reid, "Relationship of Humour to Health", British Journal of Health Psychology, Feb. 2004.