WELLSVILLE — “Who’s the best doctor in Andover?” Dr. William Coch asked a crowd at Tuesdays with Grace, a question he used to ask his patients to judge their mental acuity.
If they laughed, because he was the only doctor in Andover at that time, then he knew they were OK.
Laughter and its medicinal qualities was the subject of his talk at the Grace United Church’s Tuesdays with Grace recently. Coch said he had made a study of laughter and its impact on the body and health of the individual. The title of the program was “Laughter: The Best Medicine, The Medical Aspects of Humor and Laughter.
He opened the talk by telling the group about the case of Norman Cousins, a journalist in the 1960s. When Cousins returned to the United States after a long-term assignment in Europe he was wracked with body pain and fatigue. He entered the hospital for help.
Physicians ran a battery of tests on him but could not come up with a diagnosis nor how to deal with the unrelenting pain. They prescribed 75 aspirins a day and injections of Bute, a drug used to treat horses. Nothing worked.
Cousins was so despondent that he checked out of the hospital and locked himself in a room. There he slept and watched reruns of “Laugh-In” on TV continuously for several days. He did nothing else but laugh and sleep. He came out of his room several days later completely cured of the pain he had suffered from for months.
Coch told the crowd that he didn’t know what cured Cousins — but the laughter must have helped.
He told the group that humans are the only species that can laugh several times at one time. Some species of ape are able to laugh just once, he said. Humans are also the only species that stand upright which facilitates laughter. Coch explained that being on all fours compacts the diaphragm and other muscles that involve laughter.
He said laughter is composed of five vowel sounds and that laughter is the first action infants exhibit. A man in the audience said that he learned that the Navajo Nation holds a laughing ceremony for infants because it isn’t until after an infant’s first laugh that the tribe considers the baby to be a human.
Coch said studies have shown that children laugh 300 times a day, while adults laugh only about 17 times a day. Studies also show that women laugh more than men and that most laughter is a social thing and not the result of something humorous.
As for the philosophical aspects of laughter Coch quoted Voltaire, who said. “The art of medicine is to keep the patient entertained while nature affects a cure.”
The doctor explained that laughter is a neurological event like a yawn or a sneeze and originates in the frontal lobe. He said that when we laugh our levels of dopamine dealing with pleasure and reward increase. Our level of serotonin increases helping to deal with depression. Oxytocin, which aids in social bonding and empathy, also increases and endorphins are released helping with pain control and well-being.
Coch said there are several kinds of laughter, including polite laughter, nervous laughter, contagious laughter, the belly laugh, silent laughter, canned laughter, irrepressible laughter and evil laughter
The doctor said that laughter is therapeutic, giving relief of pent up energy specifically regarding taboo subjects such as social or ethnic, emotional or sexual tensions.
Coch concluded that while it has not been scientifically proven that laughter can be used as a medical treatment, “it can’t hurt.
He advised the audience to feel better by laughing more often and increasing laughter by spending more time with others, nurturing relationships, trying to be funny by telling a joke, using laughter to make others comfortable and spending more time with children who laugh more readily.
“Count your blessings,” he said, “and smile more often.”
