Is laughter the best medicine? 

We live in a time of disinformation and where expertise in a given field is often called in to doubt by those who know little or nothing of the same fields. This can be very challenging as a clinician, after spending a good part of our lifetime learning about pathology, pharmacology and more- to be told that we are wrong and a googled response stating pseudoscience is correct is a frustrating experience. Especially when it seems that we could do more to help. Consultations that follow these themes are perhaps particularly challenging as medicine recognises the importance of including the patient’s own experience of illness in to the medical plan. Ordinarily I am an advocate for greater inclusion but there are limits beyond which we expose people to harm through the guise of being agreeable. 

The importance of humour.

It was when I was thinking about the power of laughter as part of therapy and communication that I saw a social media post stating that starvation activated a part of the immune system that is otherwise dormant. This post claimed that by going through periods of starvation the person’s body will devour pre-cancerous cells, cholesterol plaques and essentially any bad stuff in the body. Remarkable.

I was left wondering, is there something in the lack of being able to laugh at such claims that has changed, perhaps leading to a greater gullibility in society? Or has this gullibility always been present and it is the expansion of virtual spheres that has led to increased exploitation of the masses? I suspect the latter and yet with exposure to such a feast of vacuous twoddle one might expect that the reading audience would become inured to it all. The idea of anti-vaxxers becoming vaccinated to health conspiracy through exposure to weaker versions of the conspiracies that they are afflicted with is a delightful thought.

Snake oil and magic water.

A popular example  of such a flawed product is the idea that consumption of water can cure a disease providing that the water consumed once knew the gentle atomic kiss of a tiny part of the same disease- now diluted to the point that the original contaminant has now been rendered a memory. This last concept, (from homeopathy), is practically poetic- water retaining the memory of a single molecule once greeted and then sadly separated, their affair a stronger memory than that of all of the guts and kidneys and puddles and oceans that one imagines such a molecule of water would also have known. Alas the poetry of life is not such that the whimsies of water can effect cure over true pathology. 

I am unsure what can be done to improve the spread of disinformation that blights the landscape of public perception of medicine and disease. However, I suspect that humour provides a powerful tool. By taking such outlandish claims as represented by these snake oil salesmen seriously we risk giving them a small weight of credence. Far preferable to smile and gently recognise that such claims are laughable and whilst their appeal may be understandable they are not to be taken seriously. 

Perhaps laughter is the best medicine.