conversations about medicine and life

Laughter is the best medicine

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Liz Breslin

And, hot off the press, the scorching new wellness trend set to take 2018 by storm is – drumroll, please –  choreographed group laughter.

I made that up, of course. It’s not nearly gobbledy-gooky enough to pass for a wellness trend. But it has been said since Proverbs 17:22 that laughter is the best medicine. Well, what Proverbs 17:22 actually says is:

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

But ‘laughter is the best medicine’ has a better ring to it and it’s the sort of quasi-medical common sense that I’m absolutely inclined to believe.

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A Swift bike and book tour

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Joe Baker

Lilliput Libraries-1Dunedin’s Lilliput Libraries are hand-crafted book-filled boxes set up on the fence line of a dedicated Lilliput Library guardian. Passers-by are encouraged to “take a book now, leave a book later”. John’s Lilliput Library needed a bit of a turn around; we needed some exercise. Thus the Swift bike and book tour was born. We decided that each tour member would take a book to John’s library and swap it with a book found therein. We would then cycle on to other Lilliput Libraries, exchanging our book whenever we found one we preferred. At any one time we would each carry only one book. We would then cycle back up to John’s with our single prized tome.

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A short history of the smile

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Barbara Brookes

Phyllis Diller
Phyllis Diller

A smile is a curve that sets everything straight” – Phyllis Diller.

But it’s  not easy to produce a smile on demand. A smile is a response to something, and therefore hard to manufacture. Yet whenever we are faced with a camera these days, we are expected to smile. It’s great if the camera catches us in a moment of pure spontaneous mirth, but rather excruciating if we have to wait for photographer to compose the shot, our smiles tightening into a kind of rictus. Yet in the current selfie culture, smiling for the camera is almost obligatory.

This wasn’t always the case. Mark Twain apparently once said, “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity, than a silly smile caught and fixed forever.” Perhaps that’s why we still don’t smile for passport photographs. If Facebook is any guide, however, the silly smile is how millions of people will now be remembered.

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This funny old thing called life

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Sue Wootton

the Queen laughingTough, irritating, painful, sad, irritating, mystifying, ridiculous, absurd, terrifying: getting through the days can be a strange old business. Sometimes you could sit down and weep – indeed, there are times when this is exactly what’s required. Sometimes though, you just have to laugh.

One thing about this funny old thing called life is that we’re all in the same boat. We’re all absurd, we’re all ridiculous, we’re all scared and we’re all going to die. Sharing our vulnerability with a dose of good humour is, as it turns out, a healthy thing to do. Laughter has well documented physiological benefits. It lowers blood pressure, releases feel-good endorphins, stimulates the internal organs, improves short term memory and increases pain tolerance. Laughter is a fantastic natural social lubricant; it reduces hostilities, dismantles barriers and enhances relationships, whether personal,political or professional.

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