It Really Is The Best Medicine Can You Put A Chuckle In A Capsule?
If you could bottle a belly laugh or compress a good guffaw into a pill, the result would be a superdrug capable of treating everything from a bout with the blues to heart disease and cancer.
Laughing, researchers said, is hearty medicine that boosts the immune system and triggers a flood of pleasure-inducing neurochemicals in the brain.
Two California scientists who study the mysteries of mirth and the medical benefits of chortling, giggling and being overcome by a hoot say humor has health-enhancing properties, some of which have yet to be explored.
“If we took what we now know about laughter and bottled it,” said Dr. Lee Berk, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Loma Linda University in California, “it would require FDA approval.”
Pioneering studies by Berk and Dr. Stanley Tan, also of Loma Linda, have shown that laughing lowers blood pressure, increases muscle flexion and triggers a flood of beta endorphins, the brain’s natural morphinelike compounds that can induce a sense of euphoria.
Laugher’s most profound effects, the researchers say, occur on the immune system.
Natural killer cells that destroy viruses and tumors increase during a state of mirth. Gamma-interferon, a disease-fighting protein, rises with laughter as do B-cells, which produce disease-destroying antibodies and T-cells, which orchestrate the immune response.
Berk and Tan presented their data Sunday at the sixth annual meeting of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor, which was held over the weekend in Orlando. The association is a group of physicians, psychotherapists and other health care specialists trying to inject humor into day-to-day medical care.
Tan, an expert on laughter’s effects on the nervous and endocrine systems, says humor provides a safety valve that shuts off the flow of stress hormones, the fight-or-flight compounds that come into play during times of stress, hostility and rage.
Recent “rage” studies at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Yale University in Connecticut comprise the flip side to the Berk and Tan work.
People who are typically hostile and prone to anger are more likely to suffer heart attacks and sudden death than their chuckling, laid-back counterparts. The reason? Stress hormones, which include adrenaline, bombard the hearts of hostile people, forcing the organ to beat as if in a constant state of fight or flight.
Stress hormones also suppress the immune system, raise blood pressure and increase the number of sticky cells called platelets that can cause fatal obstructions in arteries.
So health dividends are multiplied, say Tan and Berk, for those who indulge in big ol’ belly laughs.
Dr. Sol Klotz and Susan Hunter, Winter Park, Fla., immunologists, agree. They are working with psychologists at the University of Central Florida on a study examining the immunological effects of humor for people with cancer and AIDS.
Preliminary results show that immunoglubulin-A, or IGA, a key immune component secreted from the eyes, in saliva and mucous membranes becomes profuse when patients are exposed to something funny. IGA’s profusion is a sign that the immune system responds quickly to humor, Klotz said.
“There’s more and more interest in humor as medicine,” said Dr. Edward Dunkelblau, president of the therapeutic humor association. An Illinois psychotherapist, Dunkelblau regularly uses humor to treat patients with a variety of mental conditions, encouraging his patients to laugh.