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"Laughter the best medicine even if you are not feeling yourself in public"
LAUGHTER REALLY IS THE BEST THERAPY
A new study shows that laughter really is the best therapy for stroke patients, according to scientists.
The research, conducted at Graz University in Austria, showed that laughter therapy helped people recovering from strokes lower their blood pressure. Thirty patients in the study were split up into two groups. One group took part in regular "Laughter Yoga" sessions over a six-week period, while the other practised movement exercises only. This laughter therapy combines laughing techniques with breathing exercises and patients involved in the test took part in three half-hour weekly sessions.
Psychologist Ilona Papousek, who headed the research, says, "This is the first study that shows that laughter has an effect on blood pressure. "Blood pressure levels remained roughly the same in the movement group but dropped significantly in the laughter group. Physical exercises were similar in both groups, meaning we can ascribe the positive effects to the laughter training. The mood improved in both groups but more noticeably so in the laughter group."
This is a well known theory. I have known all kinds of nasty germs to be expelled by laughter. Just take the piss out of someone you don't like down the pub. It's been proven that nobody has ever died laughing but plenty of people reckon they have at some time or another.
I love the way that laughter can now be conducted under laboratory conditions. According to the above research laughter can be registered and so, not necessarily be spontaneous. If I had some scientist try to test my blood pressure while I was laughing I would think someone is trying to have a bit of a joke with me. Imagine if every time you went to your GP and he told you that you had a life threatening disease and then started making you laugh at the blood test results? Bit inappropriate don't you think?
I remember when I had to give a sperm sample. My wife and I had tried for a baby. The equipment had arrived. The wind was in the right direction. But we had no joy. Actually that's a lie. We loved every minute of it.
I was given a little plastic pot. I remember thinking how in thunder I was going to get all 'that' in such a small receptacle. Surely, it would be like trying to pour a cup of tea on a trapeze?
I arrived at the hospital car park at my designated time, where a car park attendant asked me the purpose of my visit. I showed him the plastic pot and he gave a knowing smile. He pointed to a tree for me to park my huge BMW under. I told him that I thought the parking space was too small. He said, "Surely you can get that 'little thing' in there." I frowned a frown, wondering why a fully grown man feels the need to wear a luminous jacket in broad daylight. I then spent the next full ten minutes trying to get my over-nourished frame out of the drivers side, jammed right up next to a Citroen 'Dolly' with an elderly couple fighting over a wheelchair, looking at me, like I had just crawled out of a swamp.
I ran towards a mishmash of scurrying nurses in 'Outpatients' first asking directions for the toilet, with my trusty empty vessel in my little hot, and ready hand. I was feeling particularly un-premeditated. My plan was to produce enough sperm to populate half of Asia and do so, in the 'twinkling of an eye', via the nearest public convenience. I swept past some gowned figures wrestling with saline cradles and eventually squeezed into the gents. I was going to adlib my 'rise to the occasion' with the same virility and prowess, as a stud bullock on prime pasture. I was totally unrehearsed. Natural instinct would take over. I would simply, obey my primate impulses. I chose a cubicle with the most graffiti daubed on the inside of the door, and sat there, nonchalant, with only feelings of self-love. I could have wished for more romantic circumstances. I desperately, tried to ignore the guy in 'Trap one' emptying the contents of his breakfast. So, over what seemed an eternity, I embarked on my urgent mission to ejaculate, amidst the backing vocals.
After, several lapses of concentration, and to the trumpeting of hand driers, the fruit of my loins were harnessed. I basked in the fact, that only a real man would be able accomplish such a task under, what seemed to me, the most unforgiving conditions. I popped the canister with its life giving product into my trouser pocket.
My forehead glistening with mild perspiration. I wandered out of the toilet into a labyrinth of corridors, and choosing not to use the lift, I spotted directions on an overhead sign, pointing to upwards of five sets of stairs. I trounced up the first three flights like a mountain goat. By the fifth stairwell, the stud bullock had gone into early retirement. Legs like jelly and with a heaving gasp, I fell through some double doors at the top of, what seemed like the Eiger, to my destination. There, I was greeted by a reception of men-hating ward clerks that looked at me like they needed a lunch-break. They stabbed their fingers into the direction of some mangled chairs, for me to sit down, like I was some badly trained house-pet. Stumbling over smirking homosexuals, and as I turned on a sixpence, I was confronted by row after row of waiting patients. A throng of bitter and twisted individuals that sat worryingly close together, and all, probably, with communicable diseases.
Fighting to get my breath, I looked harder at their expressions and all of them seemed to be focussed on my groin area. Grinning like giggle nuts.
To my horror I looked down to my nether regions to see that my grey cargo pants had a dark frothy stain, and with my heart now fully arrested, it looked for all to be the size of Peru, in the crotch area.
My freshly whipped specimen had unscrewed and emptied inside…. my pocket.
Laughter is the best medicine only if you can keep a straight face.
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