Humor in Medicine
Have you ever heard the phrase, " Laughter is the best medicine?" Surprisingly, that's true, so let me help you discover some of the things laughter can do for you.Norman Cousins is generally credited with starting the scientific study of humor some 20 years ago. Anatomy of an Illness tells how watching comical movies helped him recover from an illness that was predicted to be fatal. Norman made it his mission to laugh 100 times a day. With this he recovered and taught us about the healing effects of humor. Medical studies indicate that laughter boosts levels of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers. Studies also show that laughter increases the cells that attack viruses, foreign cells and cancer cells. Plus it decrease your stress level and fights depression. Laughter exercises your heart by raising and lowering your heart rate and blood pressure. It also makes your lungs stronger and gets your blood flowing going. One doctor says that 20 seconds of hard laughter gives your heart the same workout as 3 minutes of hard rowing. Let us think about this for
Now that you know how healthy humor can be, let me share with you why we need more humor in hospitals. Which would you choose? Healthcare workers with a sense of humor also benefit from reduced stress and have a better understanding of their patients. If you have ever been in a hospital for more than a couple of days you know how depressing it can be. Nurses can have troubles with some patients, especially when they aren't happy where they are. After the first week humor is essential to stopping cabin fever and its benefits make it a needed addition to every hospital stay. Many mental institutes have humor rooms, with comedy carts full of costumes; gag props, closed-circuit comedy television channels, and visits from clowns to increase the use of laughter. a moment, you could laugh with friends for 20 seconds or work up a sweat on a rowing machine. This could benefit all of us if we were in the hospital. By learning to smile and laugh again, more easily and often you could have a profound and positive effect on our health and well-being. In fact adults laugh approximately 15 times per day, while children laugh about 400 times a day! By the time you reach adulthood you've lost a few hundred laughs a day. We need to take what he did and do more with it. So I would like to leave you with a joke just to get you laughing more today. We could all benefit from a little bit more laughter. By adding more laughter in hospitals and in the world maybe we can accomplish some good moods and good health. Since children get hundreds of laughs everyday it's only appropriate that we let them make us laugh.
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