Love and Laughter; The Best Medicine
With all the tension that has built up during this primary season, (my wife often walks around the house muttering "the Clintons are killing me"), I believe it is important to find ways to relieve the stress and bring us back to a more centered space. As a physician, (surgeon for 16 years, now in integrative medicine), I was inspired last week by dallasdoc healthcare night. So I decided to start another short series of diaries in integrative medicine. If you are unfamiliar with integrative medicine, it is generally considered a blending of conventional and alternative medicine. We are bombarded with television ads on how numerous pharmaceuticals, supplements or various devices can improve our health and our lives, but no talks about the things that are readily available to all of us and have been shown to be far more effective than any medicine or devices.
It should come as no surprise that love and laughter can improve our health, as we have know for a long time that stress, depression and anger can result in significant physical illness. One is two to three times more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke in the first two hours after an episode of anger.The most common time for heart attacks is monday morning 9 o'clock. How do we change this? Love and laughter. Patients in cardiac rehab shown thirty minutes of comedy on television as part of their rehab had lower blood pressures, took less medication, and had one-fifth the recurrence rate, when compared to standard cardiac rehab patients. One study found depression a better predictor of future cardiac problems than the severity of disease, level of cholesterol or even smoking.
A group at University of Maryland, when studying blood in a major artery showed a 22 percent increase in blood flow in participants shown funny movies, compared to a 35 percent decrease in flow in those shown stressful shows.
One Harvard study followed up students after thirty-five years and found that those who had felt love from at least one parent had an incidence of chronic disease of forty-seven percent. Those who felt little love as children from either parent had a one hundred percent incidence of disease. In a trial, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, male heart attack survivors that were socially isolated and had a high degree of stress had four times the risk of death than those with low levels. These results seem to be independent of other risk factors.
Things we know about stress; it weakens the immune system, raises blood pressure, is associated with stomach ulcers, increases our risk of heart disease and stroke, may result in slow brain damage and increases the risk of back pain. Repressed anger is associated with increased pain in arthritis patients and increased attacks in asthma patients. In health terms, divorce is equivalent to smoking one pack per day.
Laughter on the other hand; is associated with stimulation of the immune system, the cardiovascular system; release of emotional and muscular tension and 100 laughs equals ten minutes on the rowing machine. Love and connection within a community have been shown to be associated with a significant improvement in longevity of the individuals within that community.
Dean Ornish, a cardiologist in California, when studying cardiac patients, demonstrated that one could achieve better results from diet, stress reduction and yoga, than with conventional medical treatment. When he examined all the factors that affected the outcome of his patients he found that no other factor in medicine- not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery- had a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes, than love.
If you ask the average man or woman, what do you want for your children? They inevitably answer happiness, peace and contentment. Maybe we should then set our priorities accordingly. So as we struggle through this primary season, cursing Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson, (not to mention Bush and Cheney),it is certainly important to pay close attention to our health through nutrition and exercise, but hopefully we won’t forget, what are possibly the most important factors in our overall health; love and laughter.
While we are at it, how about a little love for the Obama campaign.