A few days ago, I made the blanket statement that thinking yourself healthy isn’t going to make you healthy, and was quite rightly called on it by Boy Infidel in the comments on the post. What I had intended to say was that a positive mental attitude is not the only treatment or preventative required. The common thing I heard during the lead-up to H1N1 from friends was “I never get the flu, and I’m really healthy, so I’m not worried about it.” I retorted to one friend that I hadn’t caught AIDS yet and I’m really healthy, so I’ll just will myself clean when I get my next hooker. Condoms be damned!
Health in general is a tricky thing, and a thing we’re still learning more and more about every day. I’m a proponent of, when sensible, medicating the body. Those who say that our wonderful bodies are naturally adept at fighting off any number of diseases are absolutely correct, but when we wind up compromised, it just seems like an obvious thing to me to use medical interventions to right the problem. Medicine is just another example of an area where our continued understanding has yielded incredible ways to increase the overall quality of life.
This is also the reason I am entirely hesitant about alternative medicine. With what I know about how the human body works and what the disciplines of biology and physics tell us, alternative medicine largely makes no sense. However, that does not mean that all alternative medicine is garbage; it just means that for someone to believe in a cure, there has to be some valid and relevant supporting data.
Naturally, then, I’m skeptical of the data I just read on Science Daily in an article entitled Body’s response to repetitive laughter is similar to the effect of repetitive exercise but it’s an interesting concept, and one I thought I’d comment on.
For starters, my fears increase dramatically when I see that the research is from Loma Linda University (LLU), which is a religious University run by the Seventh-day Adventists. While I have only limited knowledge of their faith, what I do know does not lead me to feel that this would be the most non-biased environment for medical testing. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong, just that I’m leary.
Ultimately, the data from their rather limited study of 14 volunteers measured blood pressure and certain hormone levels in the blood after exposure to both a highly humorous and a highly distressing video. The end result was that they found that watching the distressing video did not produce any statistically significant changes in the levels of leptin and ghrelin, which are both involved in appetite, but the viewing of the humorous video resulted in the leptin decreasing and the ghrelin increasing, which mirrors the effect of moderate physical exercise and is thought to be related to increased appetite.
I’m no expert on the subject of endocrinology, but I’ve read before information like thisthat ties ghrelin and appetite, so it probably should be looked into further to determine if their findings are reasonable.
Again, I don’t know how valid the information they present here is, but I do know that appetite is a major factor in a lot of diseases. If we can figure out ways to better control the hormones that regulate our appetite, then on both sides of the fence we can presumably see benefits. There are plenty of diseases that involve a distinct loss of appetite, and of course appetite control is a factor on the other end of the spectrum in helping deal with some of the seriously overweight people in the world.
I cannot validate the information in this study, but the reason I present it is just to remind us that, while thinking yourself well is hardly the best direction for a sick person to travel, the overall health of the body is always a factor, and we can implement that by reducing stress, laughing, and staying positive. It’s not enough, but it never hurts.
Jim
