Laugh Your Way to Health (April 28, 2006)

Nurse Nola Kindheart

 

     We all love laughter.  It is a profoundly effective tool for keeping us healthy. Research studies show that laughter improves the cardiovascular system by stimulating our hearts.  It provides more oxygen to the brain, thereby helping us to think more clearly.  Studies have also shown that a good laugh can fend off infection.  Most of us have heard the expression: “Laughter is the best medicine.” I believe it, and so I went searching for more information about the value of humor.

     When the opportunity came along to attend a Laugh Conference, I was the first to sign up.  The conference was being held in San Francisco at the Jack Tar Hotel.  It offered continuing education credits for health care professionals, so it didn’t take any coaxing to get four of my colleagues to join me on this adventure to the big city. 

     The conference started on a Friday afternoon and ran from eight am to five pm on Saturday and Sunday.  At least a thousand folks gathered for the conference, some coming from as far away as New York.

     We headed to San Francisco Friday morning.  We got off to what turned out to be a wonderfully humorous and rewarding start at the Jack Tar.  Due to an error on the hotel’s part, they upgraded our accommodations to the penthouse floor.   What luxury and what a great beginning to a wonderful weekend.

     The overall theme of the conference was the healing value of humor in medicine. The conference opened each day with a general session, after which we broke up into smaller groups, selecting from four or five different laughter topics.  We split up and each attended a different session so that we could expand our knowledge base.

     At the end of each conference day, various vendors brought humor items for our perusal.  There were books, tapes, hats, toys, and humor kits, just to name a few of the items we rushed to purchase.  It added a party-like flare to the fun of the whole activity.

     The moderator of the Laugh Conference was Steve Allen, Jr., son of the famous comedian.  He was an emergency room doctor in New York City.  Before coming to the conference he had started working with laughter in medicine as a sideline.  By the time I attended my next laugh conference with my husband at Disneyland two years later, Steve Jr. had given up his E.R. practice and was working full time with “healing humor.”

     Comedians Steve Allen and Sid Caesar were two of the outstanding speakers of the conference.  Their sons, both doctors, joined their dads on stage to share some of the ways they use humor daily in working with their patients, and the effect humor had had on each of their lives growing up with comedy star fathers.

     Another of our favorite speakers was Annette Goodheart, a psychologist from Santa Barbara.  Annette says, “Laughter is an innate & natural way of achieving connection, clarity, health, harmony & lightness by rebalancing the chemistry of tension, stress & pain, and having fun doing it.”  She operates her practice on a houseboat on the bay.  She brought one of her favorite companions with her Tee Hee Bear.  She travels with her bear.  No one is a stranger for long, when they see her arrive with her two-foot tall, huggable sidekick.  A Tee Hee cousin bear came home with me.  He was a present for my husband. David strapped Mr. Tee Hee on his bike the next morning and off to work they pedaled.  He was David’s daily office companion until the day he retired.  His humor bear often brought him and other employees welcome relief to stressful and hectic workdays.

     Aside from lectures, we were also treated to humor play.  At one of the general session they taught us how to juggle with brightly colored scarves.  Envision 1000 people juggling 4000 bright scarves in one room.   At another session we did face painting on each other.  There were some fabulous faces with multicolored balloons, stars, big red smiles, and spiders, just to give a few examples of the original artwork we, as well as the non-participating hotel guests, all enjoyed viewing throughout the day. We laughed through and loved every minute of the conference.

     The two and a half days flew by and, when it was over. we all hated to leave.  We agreed it was the best as well as the most hilarious conference we had ever attended.  We returned to our homes and our work with a vow to make humor a much more visible part of our health work and our every day lives.  We all listened attentively and agreed that we had come to a much better understanding of why “humor is the best medicine” and vowed to help teach our patients how laughter can lead them to better health.