Argumentative Essay On Laughter Therapy

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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. …show more content…

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

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