Laughing May Be Harmful to Your Health
Really. Some experts are saying that laughter can do things to our jaws, cause asthma attacks, make our heads ache, even disrpt cardiac rhythms, writes Jan Hoffman at the NYT . The pulication where the study appeared, The British Medical Journal, had not addressed laughter in a serious fashion in over a century, according to Hoffman. "In 1898, it had published a case study of heart failure in a 13-year-old girl following prolonged laughter. The next year, the laughter problem was raised again, when an editorial writer, in response to an Italian doctor’s suggestion that telling jokes could treat bronchitis, dismissively proposed the term “gelototherapy” (Gelos was the Greek god of laughter; in Italian, gelato is ice cream.)." Laughter has long been advised as a treatment for depression, and a famous magazine editor claimed in the 70's that The Three Stoodges cured him of a serious illness. But there's also been criticism of the feel-good prescription. ...