PBL Pearl Vol 2 (#19): Prescription: Laughter

Recently someone mentioned to me that medical school is a stressful experience to which I responded is the pope catholic, do bears poop in the woods....tell me something I don't know. Then I began to think of humor in the medical school curriculum. I love to laugh and if you google laughter and medicine there are thousands of responses. Without looking like I am losing it there is even laughter yoga that has become popular in North America. Now why do I bring this up? I think that as we fill these young brilliant minds in our school with myriads of facts and algorithms it’s important that they remember that there is an awful lot we don't know and we can't explain....here are some of the studies done on laughter....

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Although there are many clinical programs designed to bring humor into pediatric hospitals, there has been very little research with children or adolescents concerning the specific utility of humor for children undergoing stressful or painful procedures. Rx Laughter TM, a non-profit organization interested in the use of humor for healing, collaborated with UCLA to collect preliminary data on a sample of 18 children aged 7–16 years. Participants watched humorous video-tapes before, during and after a standardized pain task that involved placing a hand in cold water. Pain appraisal (ratings of pain severity) and pain tolerance (submersion time) were recorded and examined in relation to humor indicators (number of laughs/smiles during each video and child ratings of how funny the video was). Whereas humor indicators were not significantly associated with pain appraisal or tolerance, the group demonstrated significantly greater pain tolerance while viewing funny videos than when viewing the videos immediately before or after the cold-water task.
http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/nem097?ijkey=vQVXkCN8QhDjDQe&keytype=ref%20

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In this study, researchers compared the humor responses of 300 people. Half of the participants had either suffered a heart attack or undergone coronary artery bypass surgery. The other 150 did not have heart disease. One questionnaire had a series of multiple-choice answers to find out how much or how little people laughed in certain situations, and the second one used true or false answers to measure anger and hostility. Miller said that the most significant study finding was that "people with heart disease responded less humorously to everyday life situations." They generally laughed less, even in positive situations, and they displayed more anger and hostility.
http://www.umm.edu/features/laughter.htm

Have a laughter filled day,
Maynard