Argumentative Essay On Laughter Therapy

In the world of modern medicine, there is a plethora of various therapies for patients, and a quick search on google can reveal them all to oneself. These therapies cover a broad spectrum of topics, from messing with our DNA in gene therapy to helping our mind in wilderness therapy, yet a type one doesn’t hear about very often is humor therapy, or laughter therapy as it may be called. It is a commonly well known phrase that laughter is the best medicine, yet people in the medical community aren’t treating it as such. Now there isn’t inherently anything wrong with this. If there is no science behind this phrase, and if laughter has been proven not to help patients why should the medical community invest in this type of therapy for patients.

The thing is phrases like these oft come about due to some logical connection, so the question becomes is laughter therapy actually helping, and if it is why isn’t the medical community embracing it.
As said up above laughter therapy isn’t something the medical community is huge on right now, but fortunately there have been a few studies produced that on this very topic. One of these studies, produced by Moonkyoo Kong and his team, focused on treating patients with a humorous stimulus. In this study he had two groups of patients, who had breast cancer, one was subjected to normal radiotherapy while the other got radiotherapy along with humor therapy. At the end of Kong’s study they concluded based on their results that humor did have a positive effect on people. In their study specifically they noted that less patients had a higher reading for radiation dermatitis, and they had better pain management. However he stated in his conclusion that, “we could not draw definite conclusions because of the lack of statistical significance,” meaning that while there were difference that the two groups they were not large enough to be considered significant thus it can’t be said that laughter therapy would be worth investing in.(1) Another study,produced by Paul Bennett and his team agrees in part with Kong. This study focused on laughter therapy in patients receiving dialysis. In this study patients exposed to humor therapy were better able to manage pain, and required notably less use of the dialysis machines. Specifically children were better able to manage pain as well. The study concluded that there were improvements in sleep quality, and respiratory function. Furthermore the study concluded that overall humor therapy was better for the patient's well-being at least in the case of patients requiring dialysis. (5). A different study agrees with Bennett's conclusion, but in this time humor therapy was used in a different population. This time in older patients, specifically in diabetic patients who were beginning to have memory issues. In this study, the patient who engaged in humor therapy proved to have a greater short term memory than those who did not engage in it, but in long term there was no real large difference that stood out.(8) Overall all of these studies seem to suggest that at least in studies focused on older people humor therapy has a positive effect, but whether or not that effect is significant or not is still in question.

Unfortunately, for humor therapy proponents there is a lack of studies produced that are able to definitively prove whether or not humor therapy works.

However there is a plethora of data available that comes from anecdotes, and while this data is not as concrete as the quantitative data from studies it is still worth noting (4). One example of this comes from Howard Bennett who claimed that the patient he had seen, and had made laugh were less anxious and frustrated in the hospital situation, and they were more likely to listen to his advice (2). Now while this is not official due to the lack of a conclusive study there does seem to be support for ideas like this, such as from an anonymous article written in Nursing Standard in 2010. This article written by an anonymous pediatric nurse stated that when a clown came to visit children in the hospital their tolerance for pain went up while their average time in the hospital went down. The article also claimed that respiratory rate, temperature, and blood pressure were lowered in patients that received a visit from the clown, and thus it can be the author believes that humor therapy is beneficial .(7) An article written in the same magazine by George Winter agrees with this conclusion, but for different reasons. He believes that humor therapy is good due to the positive effect if can have on the patient to medical staff relationship. (9) This doesn’t seem to be a one-off conclusion though, because a journal called Pediatric Nursing published a piece by Rick Majzun in which it stated that normal hospitals could learn from childrens hospitals, because children hospitals tend to have more laughter going on inside them, and that this allows for patients to easily connect to their doctors. Furthermore the articles states that this method should be pursued due to the fact that it is cheap compared to the other kinds of more expensive methods to try and improve relations between the patient and staff(10). Humor

therapy can be so effective sometimes it can even convince children to looking forward to visiting the doctor. (4) This isn’t a new phenomena though humor is something that is being used everywhere to improve patient relationships, such as in Belize where one doctor purposely makes jokes the instant the patient walk in the door. The doctor, Rosita Arvigo, believes that this calms the patient and allows them to get over there sickness easier, because, “most people think too much. Get them to laugh, and half their trouble and sickness will go away and the blessed plants will do the rest!” (3)
All of those anecdotes when combined lead one to believe that humor therapy is helping people. The way it does it this is however is mainly by focusing on helping one's mind wit, not necessarily one's body . This conclusion is consistent though with a study produced Mora Ripoll in which it was concluded that “Current empirical data for the psychological benefits associated with laughter is stronger than that of its physiological benefits; however, further well-designed research is warranted in all of these areas.” meaning essentially there are more benefits to the mind from laughter therapy than benefits to the body. (6)
There are problems with these conclusions however, because for the studies the sample size is small. This doesn’t mean one should throw out these results, but it should be noted that these results could just be outliers. Furthermore in these studies there was no set control of how much each person laughed mainly because there is no standard unit of measure for laughter. Thus it is impossible for a person to measure and compare how much one has laughed to another patient going through humor therapy. Additionally for the control group there is no way to guarantee these patients haven’t laughed at some point when they aren’t being monitored, and this means the studies can’t show what happens when a patient has not laughed. Even when a patient laughs however there is no guarantee that it is genuine, as there is a form of laughter called self-induced that means the person makes themselves laugh. There is no way to distinguish between genuine and self induced laughter, and this makes it harder to prove the beneficial effects of laughter. This is because there may only be a positive effect in genuine laughter, and self-induced laughter may not actually net a benefit to the patient, but in a study there is no way to tell a difference and thus the results may be compromised(5).
Overall humor therapy has shown to be a benefit to the patient in a multitude of studies, but these studies have various problems lying within their design. These problems are difficult to solve, they would require a new unit of measure, and that would require some new method to be able to measure laughter, which isn’t an easy task. Laughter therapy does have some things that will make it hard for the medical community to fully embrace it, and overall there need to be more studies produced that have a better methodology to definitively say that laughter therapy works. But in today's society treatments are getting increasingly more expensive, so does it really hurt to try the free laughter therapy? All it takes for laughter therapy is to have a medical staff member cut up with the patient, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t hurt to try it. So until more studies are produced physicians have nothing to lose by using laughter therapy.