Laughter
for Health back to
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Humor
and Laughter for Health with Sherry Hilber, Margaret Stuber and
Lonnie Zeltzer
By Sherry
Dunay Hilber WebMD Live Events Transcript Archive
(excerpt)
That
is the role of humor and laughter in health and illness? Are you
anxious when you go to the doctor? Hospitals are becoming more
interested in promoting well-being than in the past.
Dr.
Margaret Stuber, MD, is a cancer researcher and professor in the
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA
Neuropsychiatric Institute. "We're interested in looking
at what physiologic changes happen when they are laughing and
when they're not laughing but amused. We want to see whether there
are actual immunologic changes in children when they are responding
to humor."
Dr.
Lonnie Zeltzer is a UCLA cancer researcher, professor of Pediatrics
and Anesthesiology, and director of the Pediatric Pain Program
at the Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA. " What are the
individual differences in ease of laughing out loud? If
it's found that the actual act of laughing aloud is an important
component in impacting the immune or cardiovascular systems, can
those children less prone to laughing aloud be trained to laugh more
readily?"
Dr.
Stuber, " I'm not sure all of what I could say to you about
what's involved with laughter. We know that it involves breathing
differently. We know that it's essential for people to
periodically sigh when they breathe, that it's not enough to just
breathe at same rate all the time. Certainly the kind of deep
breaths that happen when you have a belly laugh makes a difference.
It makes a difference if you're breathing by using your abdominal
muscles and that is the essence of a belly laugh. What is interesting
to me is that probably the less obvious aspects of laughter may
be even the more important ones, that is, that it probably changes
the chemistry in your brain and when it changes chemistry in brain,
that changes the way you perceive things around you. You're less
irritable, you're happier, things don't bother you as much, you
feel less anxious, less pain. That could be evaluated physiologically.
I suspect it changes a lot of aspects of the chemistry
in the brain and hormones in the body."
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