Laugh away cancer (and many other ailments)

I’ll admit, the concept of laughter therapy is not new. However, I’ve been realizing lately that too few people take the potential benefits of laughter seriously. Yes, ironically, you should take laughter seriously — it’s the one contagious thing that’s nice to catch, and it’s completely free of cost. Intuitively, laughter is a good thing (and clearly, Julia Roberts is a fan).

But what does the research say?

The more obvious benefits of laughter are that it relaxes you, it’s aerobic and gets your blood moving, and it can really work your abs. What interests me the most, however, is the ability of laughter to significantly lower the body’s level of cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that the body produces in response to stress, and while I’m sure it was extremely useful back in the early human days when stress meant encountering a bear or not finding food for days, people today can find themselves stressed when there’s no Wi-Fi or if their order gets messed up at a restaurant. This isn’t to say that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be stressed in today’s society, but we could all probably use a way to lower our cortisol levels. This is especially true considering that cortisol is known to suppress the immune system, increase blood pressure, act as a diuretic, and have other effects you might not need just because you can’t find your car keys. So, maybe the link between laughter and lowered cortisol helps to explain the research findings below, but regardless, laughter seems like pretty awesome stuff:

1. Laughter and cancer. Last year, researchers in Japan prescribed laughter therapy to an 88-year-old woman with advanced stomach cancer. She didn’t want traditional cancer treatments, so for a year and seven months the team responsible for her care focused instead on making her feel safe and relaxed and “increasing her joy of living.” At the end of her laughter therapy, a biopsy showed that the molecular features of her cancer had improved and the classification of her tumors were of a less severe type than before. Even five years afterwards she was still in “good condition”; the five-year survival rate for her type of cancer is 45%. Even though this one woman is an extremely small sample size, if she truly did only laugh more and feel more positively as her only treatment, then I am duly impressed.

2. Laughter and IVF. Doctors in Israel working with women seeking in vitro fertilization wanted to test whether stress reduction could improve fertility, so they arranged an experiment to do so. Out of 219 women, 110 were visited by a professional medical clown for 12-15 minutes immediately after their embryos were implanted, and the other 109 were not. Ultimately, 36.4% of the women who got the clown treatment became pregnant, compared to only 20.2% of the control group (this was very statistically significant, p=0.008). Maybe Israel has the right idea in offering degrees in medical clowning.

3. Laughter and immune function. This study in California supports the idea that if cortisol suppresses the immune system and laughter suppress cortisol, then laughing should improve our immune responses. In a group of 52 men, a subset watched a 1-hour “humor video” and an equal number did not. Before and after the viewing, blood samples were taken from the study participants. Significant increases were seen in immune cell activity (natural killer cells, B cells, helper T cells, and others) and the amount of circulating antibodies in the men who watched the video compared to those who hadn’t. This study was not the only one to observe these immune effects of laughter.

Doing a search for the research on laughter therapy will reveal many more applications of the biological benefits of laughter than the few I’ve shown here. I really can’t emphasize this enough: even if you’re still skeptical, laughing is still one of the simplest, most cost effective methods to potentially help yourself — what’s to lose by trying? And while I’m sure that few people are opposed to laughing as it is, you can make actual conscious efforts to laugh more in your life, like joining the laughter yoga movement.

To help get you started, I’ve never known anyone to watch this video and not laugh — do it for your health!

Noji S, & Takayanagi K (2010). A case of laughter therapy that helped improve advanced gastric cancer. Japan-hospitals : the journal of the Japan Hospital Association (29), 59-64 PMID: 21706962
 
Friedler S, Glasser S, Azani L, Freedman LS, Raziel A, Strassburger D, Ron-El R, & Lerner-Geva L (2011). The effect of medical clowning on pregnancy rates after in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer. Fertility and sterility, 95 (6), 2127-30 PMID: 21211796
 
Berk LS, Felten DL, Tan SA, Bittman BB, & Westengard J (2001). Modulation of neuroimmune parameters during the eustress of humor-associated mirthful laughter. Alternative therapies in health and medicine, 7 (2) PMID: 11253418