Sandy Hutchens Cancer Prevention

Laughter Therapy, Three Stooges, and Twilight Zone Marathon

All of us have the gift of laughter. Laughter itself is nature’s medicine. Our spirits are lifted and we feel happy. Laughter is contagious. It can bring human beings together in joy. It can also enable us to feel more alive.

Laughter therapy is the use of humor such as the Three Stooges on New Year’s to promote our health and well being. By employing our native physiological process of laughter we are relieved of our physical and emotional burdens.

Laughter Therapy Studies

A growing number of studies support the view that laughter has therapeutic value.

Humor has been used in medicine for millenia. Surgeons have used humor to distract their patients for centuries.The 20th century revealed a scientific study of the effect of humor on wellness. Norman Cousins is famous for promoting this in Anatomy of an Illness which looked at humour such as The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers as healing balms for the soul. Cousins claims that he cured himself with laughter and vitamins.

Over the years, studies have explored the impact of laughter on our health. After testing study participants before and after a humorous event it was revealed that episodes of the Three Stooges helped to reduce pain, decrease stress hormones and boosted the patients immune systems.

Now more than ever before in history, people are turning to humour for healing. Medical journals are agreeing that laughter therapy help improve quality of life for those suffering from chronic illnesses. A lot of hospitals offer laughter therapy programs as an alternative treatment.

Laughter Heals

It certainly seems strange to turn to humour when faced such serious issues. Yet, laughter can be helpful in ways you might not have realized or imagined.

Laughter helps you with your own self esteem and the life flowing around you. When you are in a state of laughter, no thing is in your mind. Laughter also creates physical changes in your body. After laughter lasting only a few minutes, you will probably feel better for many hours.

When appended to conventional cancer treatments, laughter therapy helps the healing process.

Studies show that laughter therapy provides physical benefits:

• Boosting your immune and circulatory system
• Enhancing your oxygen intake
• Stimulating your heart and lungs
• Setting off the release of your endorphins
• Easing digestive problems
• Relieving pains
• Balancing your blood pressure
• Improving all your mental functions

Laughter is the best medicine, Three Stooges, Twighlight Zone Marathon, New Years 2010

Chinese Medicine Drug May Treat Cancer

A promising cancer drug, first discovered in a mushroom commonly used in Chinese medicine, could be made more effective thanks to researchers who have discovered how the drug works. The research is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and was carried out at The University of Nottingham.

In research to be published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Dr Cornelia de Moor of The University of Nottingham and her team have investigated a drug called cordycepin, which was originally extracted from a rare kind of wild mushroom called cordyceps and is now prepared from a cultivated form.

Dr de Moor said: “Our discovery will open up the possibility of investigating the range of different cancers that could be treated with cordycepin. We have also developed a very effective method that can be used to test new, more efficient or more stable versions of the drug in the Petri dish. This is a great advantage as it will allow us to rule out any non-runners before anyone considers testing them in animals.”

Cordyceps is a strange parasitic mushroom that grows on caterpillars (see image). Properties attributed to cordyceps mushroom in Chinese medicine made it interesting to investigate and it has been studied for some time. In fact, the first scientific publication on cordycepin was in 1950. The problem was that although cordycepin was a promising drug, it was quickly degraded in the body. It can now be given with another drug to help combat this, but the side effects of the second drug are a limit to its potential use.

Dr de Moor continued: “Because of technical obstacles and people moving on to other subjects, it’s taken a long time to figure out exactly how cordycepin works on cells. With this knowledge, it will be possible to predict what types of cancers might be sensitive and what other cancer drugs it may effectively combine with. It could also lay the groundwork for the design of new cancer drugs that work on the same principle.”

The team has observed two effects on the cells: at a low dose cordycepin inhibits the uncontrolled growth and division of the cells and at high doses it stops cells from sticking together, which also inhibits growth. Both of these effects probably have the same underlying mechanism, which is that cordycepin interferes with how cells make proteins. At low doses cordycepin interferes with the production of mRNA, the molecule that gives instructions on how to assemble a protein. And at higher doses it has a direct impact on the making of proteins.

Learn about Herbs – Rhodiola and Cordyceps (video)

Having sex at an early age can double the risk of developing cervical cancer, a study of 20,000 women suggests.

The investigation into why poorer women have a higher risk of the disease found they tended to have sex about four years earlier than more affluent women.

Previously, it had been thought the disparity was the result of low screening uptake in poorer areas.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer findings are published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Although the difference in cervical cancer incidence between rich and poor – across the world – had been noted for many years, it was not clear why this is the case.

Especially as rates of infection with human papillomavirus (HPV) – the sexually transmitted infection linked with the vast majority of cervical cancers – seemed to be similar across all groups.

The study confirmed that the higher rates of cervical cancer were not linked to higher HPV levels.

But what it did reveal is that the two-fold increased risk was largely explained by women from poorer backgrounds starting to have sex at a younger age.

The age at which a woman had her first baby was also an important factor.

Screening was found to have some effect on the level of risk.

But the number of sexual partners a woman has and smoking did not account for any of the difference.