Funny Bone’s Therapeutic Value Is a Bone of Contention

Imagine a painkiller that could treat a variety of ailments, available without a prescription, whose only side effects are chuckles, giggles and maybe even guffaws.

The cost? At most, the price of a video.

UCLA researchers are hoping humor will prove to be a miracle pill in a study examining a tantalizing premise: What if something that makes you feel good can stop you from feeling bad?

They’re testing the theory in a pain lab at UCLA Medical Center, where healthy children are asked to submerge their hands in ice water.

Watching videos ranging from clips of old Marx Brothers films to “The Simpsons” helps the youngsters endure the ice bath. The researchers hope it ultimately will help ease the pain of kids sick with cancer and other debilitating diseases, and maybe even help them heal.

Preliminary results indicate the kids watching funny videos were able to keep their hands in the ice bath 40% longer.

The idea for the study came from a former TV sitcom executive.

It was an instant hit with Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer, a pediatric pain specialist, and colleague Dr. Margaret Stuber, a UCLA psychiatry professor.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘Gee, why didn’t we think of this?’ ” Zeltzer said. “It makes perfect sense.”

Some researchers believe humor works simply as a distraction. They point out that other studies have shown that other kinds of emotion --even sadness or disgust--have a similar effect.

Stuber calls that “a very legitimate question,” but says there are suggestions that humor may be able to produce more long-term changes.

The notion that humor might actually produce healing-enhancing changes in the body is gaining respect among some scientists in a field called psychoneuroimmunology, which studies interactions between the brain and the body’s disease-fighting immune system.

Humor-health researcher Lee Berk says the notion that entertainment may be healing is actually very old, dating at least to the ancient Greeks, who used to build hospitals next to amphitheaters for the benefit of patients.

Berk, assistant adjunct professor of family medicine at UC Irvine, says he coined the term eustress--”eu” meaning “good” in Greek--to define what happens to the body when it feels mirthful, or the opposite of stress.

In a stressful or painful situation, the body increases production of stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine. That in turn causes an increase in heart rate and blood pressure.

Research has shown that stress can also inhibit the body’s immune system and make people prone to illness. Some studies also suggest that humor just might have the opposite effect.

A Japanese study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. found that skin welts shrank in allergy patients who watched Charlie Chaplin’s comedic classic “Modern Times.”

And Maryland researchers reported last year that people with healthy hearts were more likely to laugh in humorous situations than people with heart disease. Though the finding may simply suggest that having heart disease makes people feel less like laughing, the scientists think it also could mean that having a sense of humor somehow protects the heart.

“Maybe science is starting to catch up to intuition,” said Berk.

The late journalist-author Norman Cousins laid the groundwork with his pioneering 1979 book, “Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient,” describing how laughter helped reduce his pain from a debilitating joint disease called ankylosing spondylitis.

Berk, who was among the first to use science to help explain Cousins’ findings, has a cartoon he likes to show people, depicting a doctor telling a patient, “Take two Laurel and Hardy tapes and one Abbott and Costello and call me in the morning.”

That’s the kind of advice the UCLA researchers hope to one day prescribe.

“That’s certainly really within the realm of possibility,” Zeltzer said. “You don’t have the side effects that you have with drugs, and it would be cheaper.”

Former TV executive Sherry Hilber, who worked on such shows as “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement,” brought the idea to UCLA, where Cousins was working when he died in 1990.

With her show-biz connections, Hilber lined up initial funding and support from relatives of such comedy greats as Chaplin, Harpo Marx, W.C. Fields and Lou Costello.

“If my dad were here, I know he would be the first one rallying and probably carrying videos by the truckload” to the hospital, said Chris Costello, the comedian’s daughter.

In the UCLA study, the researchers are gauging the impact of humor on the physiologic responses to stress in 30 children, ages 8 to 18.

The scientists are examining changes in heart rate, blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the children’s saliva in response to watching the videos. All three normally rise in response to stress or pain, but Zeltzer said she expects humor will diminish that effect.

Stuber and Zeltzer hope to continue the research by studying sick children, with hopes that humor will alleviate their pain and perhaps even strengthen their immune systems. The result could mean smaller doses of narcotic pain medication, shorter hospital stays and better quality of life, Zeltzer said.

Children are ideal subjects because their biologic systems are still forming, she said. The experiment could thus act as a “biologic template” and permanently improve the way they respond to pain and disease, she said.

The UCLA researchers are seeking funding for their study’s next phase--and that has been a stumbling block for others researching the therapeutic uses of humor.

Drug companies fund a substantial portion of medical research, but unless some genius figures out how to bottle humor, “they’re not interested in funding this,” said University of Western Ontario psychologist Rod A. Martin. “There’s no money in this for them.”

Most of the funding for psychoneuroimmunology research goes into studies on the negative effects of stress on the immune system. It’s a more accepted concept and one that can easily be studied in animals, said Christopher Coe, a University of Wisconsin researcher and president of the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society.

“It’s hard to think of animal states that are the equivalent of human laughter,” he said. “You can pet your dog, you can tickle your chimpanzee, but it’s not the same as watching a funny video.”

Coe’s research in monkeys suggests that creating positive feelings can counteract the negative effects of stressful situations on the immune system.

When monkeys were moved to a new, unfamiliar environment, blood tests showed a significant reduction in their ability to make disease-fighting antibodies. But when the monkey had a primate companion in the move, there were no negative effects, Coe said.

There have been suggestions in human studies that humor and laughter can help the body overcome similar negative effects of stress, but “that’s less understood,” Coe said.

“It’s very appealing to think that laughing is good for you, because it’s so enjoyable” and because so many other things that are known to be healthful, like diet and exercise, aren’t so fun, said Rod A. Martin, a University of Western Ontario researcher who studies the psychology of humor.

But in an article in the American Psychological Assn.’s Psychological Bulletin in July, Martin concludes that existing evidence “is generally weak and inconclusive.”

He noted, however, that some research has suggested that “getting people sort of grossed out” by showing them “a really disgusting film of motor vehicle accidents” or very sad by showing them tear-jerker movies also helps improve pain tolerance.

“It may be that just emotional arousal . . . whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, leads to more pain tolerance,” Martin said.