LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE!

Or, just tickle your funnybone to fix those hardened arteries please!

By Ovid Publius Hadweenzic Ph.D., Professor of Fractured Funnybones & Affairs of the Heart at the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious in Leading Tickles West, Newfoundland

North Americans will be pleased to know that they can forget all about popping expensive pills or adopting extreme lifestyle changes to treat chronic heart problems.

According to a leading cardiologist, Dr. Michael Miller at the University of Maryland Medical Centre, “the old saying that ‘laughter is the best medicine’ definitely appears to be true when it comes to protecting your heart”.

Researchers found that people with heart disease were 40 percent less likely to laugh at things compared to people of the same age without heart disease. (Well, no doubt this finding also probably accounts for why those with hard hearts also have difficulty locating let alone exercising their funnybones).

The Indiana University School of Medicine also says that laughing helps to relax knotty tense muscles, lowers blood pressure and even burns off unwanted calories. And these days, humor prescriptions are being handed out by psychiatrists looking for ways to reduce the need for hallucinogens and possibly find new patients.

If a laugh a day really does keep the doctor away, then there's no time to lose! Besides, no one it seems has ever died from laughing too much. Although that doesn't seem to have stopped some dentists resorting to the use of "laughing gas" as a way of painlessly extracting a few useless wisdom teeth.

According to parents, bosses, and teachers however, "life is no laughing matter". Thankfully, the rest of humanity's answers to life's little problems is, "lighten up!"

And so, with the arrival of the biggest gift-giving season of all, it’s definitely time to take extend a bit of good cheer to all the less fortunate, funnybone-impaired folks on the planet, (or at least here in North America which is home to the highest number of hardened hearts per capita in the world).

When all is said and done, the only real solution to any state of dis-ease is definitely more smiles and snickers not to mention oodles of strokes for folks! So, here’s a list of raucus reading material recommended by The Laff-A-Lot Club and Santa’s Spunky Stocking Stuffer Society, (affectionately known as the “Stuff It!”. (NOTE: All these great giggling gems can be found online at http://www.lulu.com)

• A Book About a Combination of Things
• A Day In the Life of A Constipated Man
• Allot About Nothing
• A Tick In The Mind’s Eye
• Between A Rock And A Hard Place
• B-Fish No. 37
• BirdBreath Life From A Bird’s Point of View
• Blank Pages
• Chicken Adventures
• Control Valves: Understanding the Underlying Issues
• Cornered/Group Discount Therapy
• Cracks, Sags & Dimwits – Lessons to Build On
• Diary of A Nobody
• Does It Perc?
• Donut Bee & The Golden Dodo – Musical Screen Play
• Emergency Toilet Paper
• FatBottom’s
• He Must Know Something; But He Don’t Say Nothing
• How Heavy is Your Balloon?
• How To Keep An Idiot Away From You
• I’d Love You If Your Head Fell Off
• In Search of the Holy Grill
• LinT: Ye Olde First Book – The Extra Fancy Version
• Meanderling
• Miserable on Purpose
• Mishmash for Everyone
• Musical Animals
• Myopic Memories:Girls Who Wear Glasses
• New Zealand with a Hobbit Botherer
• Nip & Tuck, Book 1: The Bare Essentials
• Nobody Eats Cotton
• 108 ½ Snappy Answers to How Are You
• Odd Family
• OhmZapper
• One Day of Irrelevance
• Over the Thumb
• Pinto Beans
• Preventing A House From Hell
• Requiem For Common Sense
• Seattle Strange
• Sgfdggf
• Sir Stink A lot & the Honey & the Chocolates
• Sometimes A Squirrel Is Just A Squirrel
• Sphincter Troupe Calendar 2005
• Square in the Nuts
• Stuff I Wrote
• Terrible Tommy’s Titillating Tidbits of Turpitude & Trivia
• The Devil’s Panties
• The Gnu TastyMint of Moo
• The Grate Book of MOO
• The Great Adventure of the Very Little Goo
• The Heart is a Lonely Hoedown
• The Laff-A-Lot Club
• The Lost Art of Cat-Surfing
• The Texas Postage Calendar
• The Spam You Love: The Essential Book of Email Forwards
• Things I Don’t Understand (And Never Will) Subtitled: I Don’t Understand How Everyone’s Written a Book But Me…I Want One Too!
• [This book will be titled when the inspiration strikes me]
• 2 Gods and A Penguin
• W- The Book
• Where Have all the Hippies Gone…A Children’s Book For Adults
• You’ve Never Heard of Me

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For those who simply have to verify all the facts before they take a leap of faith, please feel free to take the laughter test administered by the folks from the University of Maryland Medical Centre - http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/humor_survey.html

And for those who can't abide another book at their bedside or in the bathroom...do drop by Amy Rubin's online laughter spot and pick up some merry merchandise for a Cool Yule from "Pinwheel" http://www.amyrubin.ca