Funny Business

"Laughter is the best medicine," suggests one age-old adage, and studies supporting this notion are beginning to pile up.

Lee Berk, M.P.H., Dr.P.H., a Loma Linda University professor, has spent years examining laughter's benefits on the immune system. Recently, he followed two groups of cardiac disease patients through a year-long rehabilitation program. Both randomly assigned groups received standard therapy, but one also viewed daily, self-selected humor for 30 minutes. Berk's findings, appearing in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, showed that when patients experienced "eustress" or mirthful laughter, disease-related symptoms such as arrythmias occurred at lesser intervals.

Taking it a step further, Berk then evaluated 52 male medical students to determine humor's effect on healthy immune systems. The students' stress levels, measured by T-cell activity in the blood (which increases to jump-start the body's immune system), were significantly lower after watching a humorous video.

Though Berk's findings are interesting, Robert R. Provine, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Viking, 2000), questions Berk's research methods. "It's impossible to know whether the reported effects are produced by laughter, humor or something not considered, like watching the video," Provine suggests."My not unreasonable concern is that a study about laughter should observe laughter."

Still, studies continue to support laughter's physiological benefits. A recent letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Hajime Kimata, M.D., Ph.D., of Japan, related his findings that allergy patients who watched Modern Times, a Charlie Chaplin film, experienced reduced swelling of skin welts.

The extent of laughter's healing potential is still unclear, but researchers have yet to find any harmful side effects. So taking time to chuckle each day may keep us laughing a little longer.