The Famous Story Of How Norman Cousins Laughed His Way to Health!
Jimmy Buffett’s in the song Changes in Latitudes famously sung, ” “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.” Laughter does having some very serious healing qualities beyond mental health as we’re about to talk about here with a man you may have possibly heard of in the past.
Norman Cousins, author of “Anatomy Of An Illness” was a longtime editor of the Saturday Review, a political writer, and recipient of hundreds of awards including the UN Peace Medal and nearly 50 honorary doctorate degrees.
Norman Cousins developed Ankylosing Spondylitis, an autoimmune disease.
Here’s his fascinating story.
In his book, Cousins talks about how he went on a trip to Russia in 1964. He was under a lot of stress and during the trip he was exposed to diesel fumes every night.
When he got back, he began experiencing pain in many points of his body and describes nodules coming up on his hands.
He saw his MD, who he really liked and had some confidence in as far as treatment and opinions go.
He did a blood test which found a very elevated ESR (sedimentation rate) which indicates an inflammatory problem.
His ESR rate kept climbing as did his pain. He was having trouble moving all his joints.
Cousins ended up hospitalized with severe pain, high fever and near paralysis of the legs, neck, back, and jaw. In 1964, medicine/healthcare was even worse with spinal problems and autoimmune disease that conventional medicine is today.
Today it’s better at managing symptoms with much more powerful medications which like all drugs have both good and bad effects that are often directly proportional to how powerful the medication is in impacting our bodies.
Cousins was particularly critical of the hospital’s care.
He reported that the hospital was more concerned with running tests than helping the patient.
Cousins goes on listing a large number of problems with the care he was receiving including…
- Severely over-medicating him for what he believed was for the convenience of the hospital more than helping him,
- Constant labwork and other testing,
- A complete disregard for his comfort or sleeping as he would be awakened multiple times a night with IV changes, being given medications, and for various interns to do exams on him,
- He also said the hospital food was terrible, not just in taste, but in nutritional value. He said it was full of chemicals and highly processed foods.
- He was particularly critical of the bread at every meal which is very forward thinking on his part for 2 reasons:
- Gluten containing products (generally highly processed grain based foods) dramatically elevates blood sugar, insulin, and inflammation.
- Gluten which is implicated as a highly probable trigger in every autoimmune disease (he didn’t know this at the time), as well as, damaging the gut and again driving inflammation.
Cousins was seen by different specialists who diagnosed him with ankylosing spondylitis. Cousins was told by his specialists that he had a 1 in 500 chance of survival and to ‘get his affairs in order.‘
“Being unable to move my body was all the evidence I needed that the specialists were dealing with real concerns,” Cousins wrote.
“But deep down, I knew I had a good chance and relished the idea of bucking the odds.“
Cousins decided that since they are telling him there is no hope and that there’s nothing they can do to save him that he needed to take matters into his own hands.
Cousins was a journalist, he was used to research and set himself to find a solution. He read and discovered that both his disease and the medicines were depleting his body of vitamin C, among other things.
He read about adrenal stress and felt that it was contributing to his disease.
He began realizing that stress and his thoughts would impact how well he recovered.
Cousins said, “I felt that stress had been a very important part of my condition. I could identify it. So I thought I would counter it with positive emotions, especially laughter.” Norman Cousins called laughter “internal jogging.“
Cousins did 3 things that would be very unusual today and certainly unheard of then.
- He fired his specialists (he kept his family doctor) and left the hospital to check into a hotel. He felt that the culture of defeat and over medication in the hospital would not be good for his health.
- He reports that the hotel was a lot cheaper than the hospital room… plus he had begun watching comedy films in his hospital room and was getting a lot of complaints about his laughing.
- Cousins decided after looking at the research that the medications were damaging his body, so he took himself off all drugs. He tried all sorts of alternative remedies, including Vitamin B-17, high doses of Vitamin C, and several others.
- He decided that if stress and negative emotions would make him worse then the opposite emotions would help him get better. He decided his b est treatment would be doing what he enjoyed most—reading humorous stories and jokes, watching comedy movies and reading his favorite.
- Cousins got piles of comic books to read. He got a movie projector and a many funny movies/TV shows including the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and ‘Candid Camera‘ shows. He spent a great deal of time every day watching these films and laughing. In spite of being in a lot of constant pain, he made a point of laughing until his very stomach hurt from it. He reported that 10 minutes of heavy laughter would give him hours of pain relief.
- Cousins did nothing but laugh and laugh each day for one entire month. He also wrote original jokes which he would read aloud to himself then laugh like crazy. He noticed that every time he laughed, his pain improved.
- Cousins claimed that 10 minutes of belly rippling laughter would give him two hours of pain-free sleep, when nothing else, not even morphine could help him. He reports that he began getting blood work measuring sedimentation rate (ESR) before and after an intense laugh.
- He found that his ESR would drop about 5 points each time and that the drop was cumulative, so each laughing session building on the previous one.
- He also did high dose IV vitamin C because he felt it would help his adrenals and knew vitamin C was involved in building the connective tissue that his immune system was attacking. He measured ESR before and after the IVs and again found the rate improved after each IV session.
At the end of one month, Cousins returned to the hospital for a checkup.
To the surprise of the medical staff, they found no trace of the dreaded disease. According to the doctors, he was completely cured of an incurable disease!
The specialists claimed 2 things at this point…
He was going to recover regardless of what he did and it was just a coincidence that he recovered and it was just the placebo effect meaning he thought he would get better so he did and the ‘treatments‘ had nothing to do with it.
This is because they believed only medication could ever help someone.
*Interesting point here, he was just in remission, but in his case the remission lasted his lifetime. It also undoubtedly occurred due to stress reduction and maybe some of the other lifestyle factors he changed. He took no medicine after his brief initial care because it wasn’t working well for him.
So as the doctors asked Cousins what medicines he took that cured him…
They didn’t believe him when he replied he had not taken any medicine since he was told his ailment was incurable.
They said, “You must have done something you never did before.”
He told them, “All I did was to laugh myself to health.”
Cousins reports that, “I have a deep respect for the (medical) profession, but the patient is the healer.”
Cousins became known as the man who cured himself through laughter, and was even appointed a faculty member of the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine, although he was not a doctor.
Cousins wrote an article titled “Anatomy of an Illness (As Perceived by the Patient)” in The New England Journal of Medicine.
His article chronicled his remarkable recovery from a severe and at the time, a life-threatening autoimmune disease of the connective tissue.
Later in 1979, he told his incredible story in a book, “Anatomy of an Illness,” which was ultimately made into a movie.
Cousins was well ahead of his time, since then scientific research has shown that laughter…
- Lowers blood pressure, strengthens cardiovascular functions, reduces stress hormones, improves circulation and oxygenates the body by boosting the respiratory system.
- Laughter also triggers the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers and producing a general sense of well-being which likely explains some of the pain relief Cousins got from watching and laughing at the various films he was watching.
Even expecting laughter can change our biochemistry.
In a small experiment conducted at Loma Linda University, researchers studied a group of 16 healthy male volunteers. The participants were assigned to two groups. Blood was drawn from both groups 4 times during the event and 3 times afterward.
The experiment group was told that they would be watching a humorous video. The control group was not told.
The findings were astounding.
The experiment group showed not only a decrease in stress hormones but also an increase in beta-endorphins (chemicals that improve pain and have been shown to improve depression) and human growth hormone (which boosts immunity and improves healing among other things).
Dr. Lee Berk, the team’s lead researcher, sums up the study: “Our findings lead us to believe that by seeking out positive experiences that make us laugh we can do a lot with our physiology to stay well.“
Interesting and further support for Cousins theories about improving health. Cousins had ankylosing spondylitis.
He should have been suffering from very serious and progressive disability.
He should have become completely disabled yet, he did not.
WHY?
Cousins had a very positive attitude, decided he needed to take immediate major action, found something he loved, and dove into it.
This significantly reducing their stress levels and improving their mood.
He did not just rely upon medications or even doing many other lifestyle changes that very likely also would’ve helped because it was not known at the time like it is among healthcare practitioners that are able to keep up with the latest research today.
At the time, no one knew about many of the lifestyle factors that can improve autoimmunity as they have really only been researched over the last 15 years or so – especially over the last several years.
The recency of the research is why it’s not yet a part of healthcare management.
It will take decades (if ever because it doesn’t rely upon medications which is the primary focus of most care today) for it begins to make it’s way into conventional healthcare unfortunately.
The reality is that medications might be helpful for many people suffering from various very serious chronic diseases including autoimmune conditions.
There are things you can do to improve chronic pain and improve your health.
The other important point that is not generally known or put into practice is that many lifestyle factors improve the function, health, and symptoms of so many people with autoimmunity (and so many other other chronic diseases).
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