Starting with laughter

Science has definitely proven the great healing power of laughter. Studies conducted in Japan and in Loma Linda, California, concluded that patients who were exposed to laughter had higher immunoglobulin and healthy cell levels.

There is an explanation: hearts and lungs are stimulated by laughter. The heart beats faster and its pressure is temporarily raised. One breathes more deeply and more oxygen is taken to the blood. The body releases endorphins, its natural pain killer, and more immune cells are produced. The body burns 78 more calories than at rest. The diaphragm, facial muscles, and all internal organs are called to engage in a kind of stationary workout.

After you laugh, your muscles and arteries relax. This is wonderful to reduce pain. Your blood pressure also goes down and the pulse rate drops below normal for a few moments. Some investigators claim that this also helps digestion.

The former editor of the “Saturday Review”, Norman Cousins, wrote about his self-cure from a degenerative disease known as Ankylosing Spondylitis (inflammation of one or more vertebrae that tends to immobilize the affected joints), providing a highly illustrative case. His chances of recovery, according to physicians, were one to five hundred. He told his doctors that he was going to stop taking his medication and started to watch all the funny movies he could find in movie catalogs and to read his favorite comics. For his doctors’ astonishment, he recovered his health and resumed his professional activities.

On the day of Bia’s first surgery I was carrying around a small book with biblical excerpts. I opened it at random to the following text: “A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries one up the bones” (Proverbs 17:22).

Later, in a magazine published by the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Friends Foundation, I read and wrote down the sentence: A merry heart makes a cheerful contenance, but low spirits sap a man’s strength”, which I later translated into Portuguese for the Portuguese version of this book.

And according to Bia’s testimonial, she never saw me in low spirits. I could say that life handed me a lemon and I made lemonade. I prefer, however, to quote a Chinese proverb:

You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from passing over your head, but you can prevent their making a nest in your hair.