EACH DECEMBER,
Somewhat in the same vein, rather than being the belligerent bore assailing you with the health hazards of gluttony and the season, I will attempt to bring you a tinkling, lighthearted meditation on the health benefits of humor.
Humor and a good laugh are good for you, or that's the premise. And though you might be skeptical of the Bible as a health resource, the writers of Proverbs (17:22) seemed to have it right with their claim that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine."
Essayist Norman Cousins claims to have laughed his way to recovery from a heart attack. Patch Adams is, of course, the best known proponent of laughter and clowning as a therapeutic modality.
Closer to home, the Luv 'N Laffs clown troupe is still seen in oversize shoes and silly noses at Mary Washington Hospital every other Saturday morning, boosting the immunity of patients and staff alike.
For boosting the immunity is what humor/laughing seems to do, among other things.
Research has shown it leads to an increase in the number of killer cells (protective immune cells) in the blood, and also leads to reduced inflammation (manifest as a drop in sedimentation rate), improved oxygenation of the blood, and increased respiration and cardiac output.
Dr. Michael Miller, director of the Center for Protective Cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, postulates that laughter does something beneficial to the endothelial lining of your blood vessels. He says this as an explanation for the results of a study he did that showed people who are less prone to laugh are more likely to have heart disease. (He found people who have heart disease are more somber than the rest of us, and are 40 percent less likely to laugh).
lightening conflict
Freud claimed humor is
There are, of course, many types of humor, from slapstick to satire, and great ethnic, national and gender variations in what we find funny. The Brits never seem to find the New Yorker funny. A lot of women don't get off on The Three Stooges.
Functional MRI studies of men and women viewing cartoons show differences in brain function--which makes one wonder if there isn't some truth to those joke diagrams of the difference between the male and the female brain. (The woman is shown to have a giant "shopping nucleus" and "I told you so" gland. The male brain has everything crowded out by a massively hypertrophied "sex center.")
What one sees as funny and what it's OK to make jokes about is a very personal business. I veer toward a risque, facetious form of humor. I have a feeling not everyone is amused by what I am (and even read disparagement where none was intended in some of my writing).
antidote to pain
There are innumerable scenarios one can laugh at, though in health care they are often tragicomic:
The previously impotent patient who was carted off to jail after sexually harassing his wife, who left his newly prescribed Viagra pills on the kitchen table, for example. This is a prime example of what the medical wags have called "Viaggravation."
The terminal cancer patient who was all blown up with subcutaneous emphysema, and whose fantastic appearance the nurses on the cancer ward laughingly, but accurately, likened to Mr. Magoo. That was a little controversial.
This may disturb you and make you think some health care workers are just insensitive brutes. But I think Freud had it right about humor being a defense mechanism.
Medicine and nursing provides no shortage of opportunities where something is needed to act as an antidote to the often heartrending situations you are faced with.
Then there's just the wacky stuff, like the guy who tried to go back on his military base after his nuclear stress test and set off the radiation detectors. Or the old chestnut about "Is an innuendo an Italian suppository?"
Your visit to the doctor may not be a laugh--to you at least. But hopefully you will bolster your health this holiday season with
Just don't overdo it like one patient, who laughed so hard at an e-mail he opened that he passed out and fell off his chair.
Dr. Patrick Neustatter can be reached at