Amp U T chat is for amputees.
[amputee/_private/headerb.htm]| VOLUME 2 # 12 | APRIL 1, 1996 |
IN THIS ISSUE
he he he APRIL FOOL'S DAY!
"Make 'em laugh,
Make 'em laugh,
Dontcha know everyone wants to laugh."
This Issue is dedicated to LAUGHTER!
1.) NOTES FROM John & Joyce
Following is a reprint of an article I wanted to look up for you and lo and behold it was in this weeks newspaper! :)
GOOD HUMOR CAN MEAN BETTER HEALTH
by Sam Quick with Sheila Brown
Extension Family Life Specialist
University of Kentucky
Cooperative Extension Service
Learning to laugh can make you feel good, everyone knows. It also can make you actually healthier.
Throughout history and across different cultures, people sensed the importance of humor to promote well-being. Medieval professor of surgery, Henrik de Mondeville recommended laughter as an aid to recovery from surgery. In days of old, court jesters relieved melancholy and brought merriment to royalty. Native America tribes such as Pueblo, Hopi, and Cree included ceremonial clowns who regularly provoked laughter and lightheartedness. What the ancient Biblical proverb proclaims, modern science now has confirmed. A merry heart doeth good like a medicine. More recently, a growing body of scientific evidence underscores physical, mental, emotional and social advantages of humor.
An old-fashioned guffaw can give a person an aerobic workout of sorts. It stimulates the cardiovascular system, send surges of oxygen throughout the bloodstream, and exercises the muscles of the face, shoulders, diaphragm and abdomen.
While laughter itself is delightfully stimulating its afterglow creates a temporary reduction in blood pressure, respiration, heart rate and muscle tension.
It also enhances creativity and problem solving and reduces tension and stress. It may even encourage healing and strengthen the immune system and contribute to longevity. Amid the most trying and oppressive circumstances, humor is a guardian angel that protects our sanity.
When you laugh together as a family, it fosters understanding, open communication and harmony. In families with young children, humor can diffuse emotionally charged issues and encourage balanced disciplinary measures. Humor also promotes good will and cooperation between generations, between those with opposing viewpoints, and between nations.
As a testimony to the healing power of mirth in recent years humor programs have sprung up in hospitals and outpatient centers across the country.
While it would be foolish to think one could "ha ha" himself out of serious physical illness or emotional trauma, it is clear that good humor aids health and overall well-being in many ways.
Strengthening one's sense of humor doesn't mean a person needs to tell jokes all of the time or try to be the life of the party. It just means opening up to the comic relief that daily life provides.
Stay Away From Humor That Hurts
Humor that ridicules, insults, teases and puts down is sick humor. Listen carefully to laughter that comes from an "I'm better than you are" attitude, laughter in response to insensitive ethnic or sexual jokes, laughter that is disrespectful to others or causes them pain. Such laughter lacks joy; its edges are rough; it creates separation and suffering; and it sets a poor example for others, particularly those who are young and impressionable. If you want you humor to be healthy, use what humor expert Allen Klein calls the AT&T principle--make sure that it's Appropriate, Timely, & Tasteful.
The Gentle Side of Humor
While laughter is an important element in a well-rounded sense of humor, cheerful smiles, playfulness and moments of quiet amusement also are important characteristics of a merry heart. The highest form of good humor is always an inside-out job. It begins with a heart that is peaceful and filled with a quiet joy. In response to one's own distinctive personality and other circumstances, this inner joy expresses itself in good-natured laughter, playful creativity and gentle smiles.
How Can You Bring More Humor Into Your Life
So, you want to bring more laughter and lightheartedness into your life? Sam Quick, Extension Family Life Specialist with University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture, offers the following "how-to" tips. Then he says, add others yourself and team up with friends to brainstorm additional ways to bring humor into daily lives.
For Further Reading:
Blumenfeld, E. & Alpern, L. (1986). THE SMILE CONNECTION. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall
Bonham, T. (1988). HUMOR: GOD'S GIFT. Nashville: Broadman Press.
Klein, A. (1989). THE HEALING POWER OF HUMOR. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher
Metcalf, C. & Felible, R. (1992). LIGHTEN UP: SURVIVAL SKILLS FOR PEOPLE UNDER STRESS. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley
((NOTE: The cooperative Extension Service offers course material for conducting a program on humor. Contact your county Extension Service to request: THE MERRY HEART.))
MAKE 'EM LAUGH course # 101 (Beginner's)
MAKE 'EM LAUGH course # 301 (Advanced)
Paul Ekman, UCSF Psychologist was recently featured in HUMAN QUEST, a multi-part study Broadcast on PBS stations. It had been long thought that expressions on the face reflected emotions felt internally...and this is most likely the case. However, Paul Ekman demonstrated by forcing and contorting his face into anguished grimaces and frowns his internal mood altered. The external expressive human face not only reflects from within to without, but also the reverse. Put a smile on your face and it will make you feel better.
In research carried out by the Laughter Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, laughter reduced stress as well as more complex biofeedback training programs. And laughter, as the researchers pointed out, requires neither special training nor special equipment. All it requires is a funny bone.
Drs. Rod Martin and Herbert Lefcourt, then of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, studied the connection between humor and adjustment to major life stresses. They gave fifty-six undergraduates four test designed to measure the capacity to enjoy humor under a variety of circumstances. Three out of four tests showed that those who valued humor the most were also most capable of coping with tensions and severe personal problems.
Martin and Lefcourt next studied sixty-seven students and found that those who had the greatest ability to produce humor "on demand" in impromptu routines are also best able to counteract the negative emotional effects of stress.
Psychologist Kathleen Dillion and her colleagues found that students who viewed a humorous videotape had a temporary rise in salivary immunoglobin A, a type of antibody that appears to defend against viral infections of the upper respiratory tract. Furthermore, the researchers found that those subjects who reported using humor as a way of coping with life stresses had consistently higher levels of the salivary antibody prior to the experiment. (Never mind the chicken soup, hand me that Warner Brother's cartoon!)
Lee Berk, an immunologist at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California states: "Cortisol, which is an immune suppressor, has a tremendous influence on the immune system. Laughter decreases cortisol, which allows interleukin-2 and other immune boosters to express themselves."
Not surprisingly, more and more hospitals and rehabilitation centers are deciding to horse around. At the BIG APPLE CIRCUS/CLOWN CARE UNIT at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, professional clowns in white coats and roller skates pull a variety of good natured pranks. For example, on clown rolls in and says, "Let's draw your blood," and pops out a crayon and a sketch pad.
Contrary to popular opinion, wearing pajamas in public does not prompt people to stare. Rather, most folks avert their eyes and pretend not to notice. Just ask C.W. Metcalf, who has also been known to glue toilet paper rolls to his feet, howl on traffic-jammed freeways, stand backwards in elevators, and let his weight-lifter wife carry him through grocery stores. For fun, he teaches his black Labrador retrieve, Gracie, to walk backwards.
((Note: Metcalf's company offers humor training programs to FORTUNE 500 companies such as IBM, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, General Electric, DuPont and Xerox.))
2.) "LETTERS TO THE EDITOR"
We've got a few, but this newsletter is sooo l-o-n-g, I think we'd better save it for next week!
THE ADVICE (DISCLAIMER)
Please be sure to read the information at this link at least once.
4.) HINTS AND TIPS
TIPS
Upper extremity
For lawn and garden tending equipment (Weed whackers, power mowers, tillers, etc.) install the soft rubber foam grips available from local bicycle shops for added comfort and gripping power. For bar-type handles: you can purchase from home stores soft foam pipe insulator to put on the bar. Do not glue TO the equipment, instead, glue the seam shut. (NOTE: Make sure that this does not defeat any of the safety equipment provided by the manufacturer. Also, when gluing the seam of the pipe insulator, don't use a glue that dries "hard.")
Lower extremity
Carrying a set of collapsible crutches in you car, can be a life saver.
Have a hint, tip, or suggestion? Please email us and we will consider it for use in the newsletter or chat room.
5.) QUOTE/THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Here are some thoughts on laughter, some a bit serious, but all worth a thought or two.
"Power, money, persuasion, supplication--these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."
--Mark Twain
(The Mysterious Strange)"Laughter has no greater foe than emotions....To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart."
--Henri Bergson
(Laughter)"Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter."
--Sir Max Beerbohm
(Laughter)"Humor is a prelude to faith and Laughter is the beginning of prayer."
--Reinhold Neibuhr
(Discerning the Signs of the Times)"We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
(To A Skylark)"Fling but a stone, the giant dies.
Laugh and be well."
--Matthew Green
(The Spleen)"And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep."
"Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda water the day after."
--George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron"No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad."
--Thomas Carlyle"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."
--Peter Ustinov"The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence."
--H.L. Mencken"Humor is the shortest distance between two people."
--Victor Borge"Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration to man's superiority to all the befalls him."
--Romain Gary"The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh."
--Carl Reiner
And finally
From the Humor Archive:
"Never play strip poker with a leg amp, some of them wear more socks than I have in my drawer."
"Potholders? Who needs potholders? We don't need no stinkin' potholders."
Little boy to an arm amp with prosthesis: How's that
thing work?
Amp: With quarters...go get your Mom's purse.
Why do drive thru ATM's have braille buttons?
This End Up? Use No Hooks? I'm calling the ACLU--'sounds like discrimination, to me.
© Copyright April 1, 1996 J. Meyer. All rights reserved.