Good medicine

Dr Lee Berk, a professor of allied health studies at Loma Linda University in California, has spent three decades studying the benefits of a good giggle. His results indicate that laughter creates eustress — the good kind of stress, which decreases distress, the bad kind.

“Laughter appears to cause all the reciprocal, or opposite, effects of stress,” said Berk. “It reduces blood levels of detrimental stress hormones, cortisol, epinephrine, and other substances. When those stress hormones are reduced, numerous immune-system components function more normally.”

Many others, among them the late US journalist Norman Cousins, have come to similar conclusions. In the 1960s, Cousins would watch episodes of the comedy series Candid Camera to make himself laugh. He found that laughter eased the pain of the crippling connective-tissue disease from which he suffered and about which he wrote in his book Anatomy of an Illness.