Laughter is the best medicine
By Bill Duncan
The View From Here
As a hospice volunteer, I recently took a training course to update myself on working with people nearing the end of life.
I asked the presenter, a palliative care nurse practitioner, her opinion of Norman Cousins’ theory on the curative power of laughter. She dismissed it is as so much voodoo rhetoric.
Since I was probably the only one in the room who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, I disagreed with her analysis. I don’t think I convinced her because she quickly changed the subject and moved on to medical theories about death and dying.
I first read about Norman Cousins’ theory in his book, "The Anatomy of an Illness" 26 years ago. Yes, I am a cancer survivor of 26 years.
Cousins, the former editor of Saturday Review magazine, had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Medical science had given up on him, so he took matters in his own hands and instead of taking pain killers he watched old movies of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges for good belly laughs.
His conclusion was that laughter excited the body’s endorphins which allowed his immune system to work toward healing. He was eventually cured of his terminal illness.
In writing this column, I am in no way trying to practice medicine, voodoo or otherwise. Nor would I suggest a terminally ill person not be given pain medicine. I have seen too much pain and suffering on the part of patients under hospice care, to even suggest that. However, in my own case, pain medicine makes me deathly ill and I have long used mind over matter as an alternative to pain medicine.
I have seen firsthand what positive thinking can do for a cancer patient. The doctor who diagnosed my cancer had the bedside manner of a crocodile and had me dead and buried within the month.
Fortunately, he referred me to a surgeon, Dr. Eric Soder, in Roseburg. Soder walked into the room and said: "You are a lucky man. You only have a level three melanoma and we can deal with that."
His words took me from the lowest point in my life to thinking that it was just another illness, not a death sentence. What happened after that is a long history of needles and knives.
It is my nature to research in great detail and I read about malignant melanoma for a better understanding, thus I was led to reading Cousins’ "The Anatomy of an Illness."
My research goes on daily even now after 26 years. In April 2000, I read an unusual book written by then-NBC newscaster, Maria Shriver, wife of California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Shriver book has a long title, "Ten Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Went Out Into the Real World."
Actually, the book is an expansion of a commencement speech she delivered in 1998 to the graduating class at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass. The book is full of down-to-earth advice, not only for college graduates, but for anybody reading it.
As a hard-nose reporter, I was touched by one anecdote in the book when Shiver revealed that she postponed an interview with Fidel Castro in order to get her daughter to her first day of kindergarten. The book contains many more personal stories about her journalism career.
For me, the last chapter, devoted to laughter, is worth more than all the other advice contained in the pages of this small book. Shiver writes that "without laughter, not much else matters. In life’s toughest times, it’s laughter that gets us through." It worked for me. I am living proof.
Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or via e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com.