Laughter is the Best Medicine

1 Credit · Level: Undergraduate

This course guides students on an exploration of humor and laughter and their impact on health, society, and the patient-provider relationship. The use of humor to engage and cope with our current, ever-increasingly stressful world can be transformative and life-affirming. Humor in medicine finds its place in discussions about our understanding of different types of people and personalities, end-of-life issues, coping with illness, and as a means to mitigate burnout. From Shakespeare to Scrubs and Dr. Patch Adams, the pleasant physical audible reaction (laughter) and its corresponding internal state (emotional joy and happiness) will be explored. The course will be divided into four parts. First, the course will expose students to the current understanding of what laughter is and how it varies from person to person. Humor will be tied to health in terms of research, therapeutics, healing power, and the use of humor in provider-patient encounters. Second, the students will learn: how medical humor and the practice of medicine have appeared in classic literature, movies, television, the arts, and the Internet and how these portrayals may impact the knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and the perception of medicine in society. Third, the course will review how humor has both benefits and inherent risks—humor can be used to address stressful situations, a provider’s own stress, and to improve workplace culture but humor can have unintended negative ramifications. Fourth the course will address the connection between how psychological traits and certain psychiatric disorders impact creativity and how creativity, humor, and comedy – both in terms of its creation and how it is received – may be impacted by certain psychosocial variables and external influences.