I'm a bit skeptical just reading the article titled A Laugh a Day Might Keep Death Further Away. In a recent Norwegian study, adults who have a sense of humor showed to outlive those who don't find life funny. I don't know about this -- I can think of a lot of miserable people who lived very long lives!
I love to laugh. Watching comedians is one of my favorite things to do, however I don't think that is going to make me live any longer than other breast cancer survivors.
The study said that the survival edge is particularly large for those with cancer. In this study the researcher claims that a great sense of humor cut someones chances of death by about seventy percent compared with adults with a poor sense of humor.
Sven Svebak, of the medical school at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, says that past studies have shown that humor helps people cope with stress and keep a healthy immune system during stressful times. He believes that could promote survival.
William Breibart, psychiatry chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York city, is skeptical also. Breibart says that in the twenty two years of treating cancer patients he met a lot of funny people who died of cancer pretty quickly. He says that stage of disease and aggressiveness of tumor matter far more than a person's sense of humor.
He did add that someone who can see humor in bad side effects of chemotherapy might stick it out more for treatment and that can be a way humor affects survival.
This sounds too much like -- you need to have a positive attitude -- cancer survivors are not particularly fond of hearing that our cancer came back because we didn't have a positive attitude or we didn't have a great sense of humor -- but laughter does make life more enjoyable!
1. Always interesting subject, but this is exactly the type of thing that will be latched onto by the "just stay positive" crowd. The thing is, humor is completely subjective. A person's sense of humor is completely personal, so there's really no way to measure it, quantify it, put it on a statistical chart. Laughter is just an outward manifestation of humor--for some people--and doesn't always spring from the same place from within, nor is it triggered by universal stimuli from the outside. There are plenty of people with great senses of humor who don't laugh much. It can certainly help to see humor in your dire situation. But sometimes I wonder if the benefit comes from the energy that is relfected back to you by the people around you--they perceive you as "positive" (whether you are or not) and reward that feeling.
Thanks for this post and best regards,
Richard Day Gore
Posted at 9:06AM on Mar 15th 2007 by richard day gore