Can Your Laughter Kill You?
Laughter is the medicine. This is exactly what we hear from our doctors and from some of the ancient scriptures. In most of the medical books, laughter has been acknowledged as the best medicine that can keep your health problems at the bay, but interestingly there have been some cases where exactly the opposite happened. It does sound really strange but in some cases excessive laughter has led to the death of the people. Of course, such cases are very rare and there might be some other unknown causes that might have contributed to it which are still unknown and hidden from the normal understanding of a human mind.
Laughter is normally considered as a stress buster because when you laugh hard the levels of cortisol, norepinephrine and epinephrine goes down which helps in increasing the blood pressure on a healthy level. With the help of laughter you can also get rid of all your mental problems because when you laugh your mind is in a good state and out of depression. Doctors normally advice sick people to laugh whenever they feel, because it can help in strengthening and increasing the immunity level inside the body. For people who are health conscious laughter is a good way of burning calories without any extra efforts.
However, there are researchers who believe that laughter cannot kill a person unless the person has some other medical problems. In that case, the person does not die because of laughter but because of the effects that laughter can create on his body which then affects the actual medical problem of that person. For instance, if a person is suffering from cardiac problems then excessive laughing can at time drop the level of blood pressure instantly which would cut off the oxygen from the heart and this would lead to the death of that person.
Although, the cases of dying because of excessive laughter are very rare there are cases in the earlier centuries where people have died because they laughed too much at one point of time which put a lot of strain on their organs. In one of the cases a Dutch man was found dead while watching a movie A Fish Called Wanda because he laughed too much while he was watching the movie and his laughter led to cardiac arrest and he could never get his life back again.
Laughter induced syncope is a kind of situation that the doctors believe can lead to death but in rare cases. As per this situation the blood pressure inside the human body rises when laughing and then drops suddenly which cuts off the supply of oxygen to the heart and brain. In some cases the patient can regain back his life after fainting for few seconds but in some cases it can lead to death. However, researchers believe that laughter induced syncope is a very rare situation and therefore not many people are affected by it. However, it has been accepted that excessive laughter can kill you if you are unfortunate.
"Can Your Laughter Kill You?", was submitted 12/2/2011 under category Humor.