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Steelsmith Natural Health Center

Creating Great Health Through Natural Medicine

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A Hearty Dose of Laughter is Good for Your Health

Q. Can laughter really help me live a healthier life? Is there any scientific evidence that laughter is the best medicine?

A lady came to the hospital to visit a friend. She had not been in a hospital for several years and felt very ignorant about all the new technology. A technician followed her onto the elevator wheeling a large, intimidating-looking machine with tubes, wires, and dials. “I’d hate to be hooked up to that thing,” she said. “So would I,” replied the technician. “It’s a floor-cleaning machine.” (From www.butlerwebs.com)

If you laughed at this joke, you affected your brain chemistry. You increased your levels of feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphin. You momentarily changed your physiology: your breathing became faster, your pulse went up, and so did your blood pressure (although only temporarily; after laughing, blood pressure actually drops). You also burned extra calories.

Over time, laughter can have a profound effect on your body, mind, and spirit. Researchers have found that regular doses of hearty laughter can help you reduce stress, alleviate depression, decrease anxiety, increase blood flow, enhance immunity, reduce blood sugar, decrease pain sensitivity, reduce blood pressure, exercise your muscles, and promote relaxation. It may also help you prevent aging by increasing blood flow to your face. Because of its effects on your cardiovascular and nervous system, laughter could help prevent many chronic diseases.

For those fighting serious illness, laughter may also be beneficial. Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness, credited laughter with helping him heal from a debilitating arthritic condition. He rented funny movies and famously laughed his way back to health.

Laughter is a universal language, regardless of race and culture. Everyone can laugh, and science has shown that many animals laugh too.

Can laughter be therapy? Dr. Madan Kataria, a medical doctor from India, thinks so. He founded Laughter Yoga, a laughter club, in 1995. While researching the health benefits of laughter, he became convinced that a prescription of twenty minutes of laughter a day would help keep the doctor away. He began with a small laughter yoga club in India; there are now more than 5,000 laughter clubs in 53 countries. Laughter Yoga participants do deep breathing and clapping exercises, chant, laugh intentionally using their lower abdominal muscles, and perform other laughter techniques. To learn more about Laughter Yoga and find classes in your area, visit www.laughteryoga.org.

A great way to laugh every day is to subscribe to a “joke of the day” website.

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This following document sets forth the Privacy Policy for this website. We are bound by the Privacy Act 1988 (Crh), which sets out a number of principles concerning the privacy of individuals using this website.

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Your personal information that we collect as a result of you purchasing our products & services, will NOT be shared with any third party, nor will it be used for unsolicited email marketing or spam. We may send you occasional marketing material in relation to our design services.

What Information Do We Collect?

If you choose to correspond with us through email, we may retain the content of your email messages together with your email address and our responses.

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As you visit and browse Our Website, the Our Website uses cookies to differentiate you from other users. In some cases, we also use cookies to prevent you from having to log in more than is necessary for security. Cookies, in conjunction with our web server log files or pixels, allow us to calculate the aggregate number of people visiting Our Website and which parts of the site are most popular.

This helps us gather feedback to constantly improve Our Website and better serve our clients. Cookies and pixels do not allow us to gather any personal information about you and we do not intentionally store any personal information that your browser provided to us in your cookies.

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P addresses are used by your computer every time you are connected to the Internet. Your IP address is a number that is used by computers on the network to identify your computer. IP addresses are automatically collected by our web server as part of demographic and profile data known as traffic data so that data (such as the Web pages you request) can be sent to you.

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We do not share, sell, lend or lease any of the information that uniquely identify a subscriber (such as email addresses or personal details) with anyone except to the extent it is necessary to process transactions or provide Services that you have requested.

How Can You Access and Correct Your Information?

You may request access to all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain in our database by using our contact page form.

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