El poder terapéutico de la risa

The holistic approach is receiving increasing appreciation in medicine and bioethics. It consists of considering the patient “as a whole” or globally, and in this sense it constitutes a complement to the trend towards specialization typical of modern medicine. It is of interest to know whether in this approach it is possible to show a causal action of the whole on its parts (top-down causality) comparable with the action of the parts on the whole (bottom-up causality) very familiar in specialized medicine. This question is particularly interesting if one considers the “totality” of the dimensions constituting the personal identity of a patient, that include his or her psychological, affective, emotional, intellectual and relational characteristics, in addition to his or her biological bodily constitution. This paper presents how a specifically human characteristic such as laughter (whose basic nature is psychological) has such a capacity for beneficial action on the global state of the human being, including his or her physiological dimensions and, as a consequence, can become a genuine therapeutic practice, of which certain forms and scientifically attested results have been reported.