Clown doctors treat young hospital patients with humor therapy

Children in Australian hospitals are being administered a healthy dose of laughter by the clown doctors wandering their wards. The Clown Doctors are part of the Humor Foundation, which aims to ease some of the pain and boredom for sick children, many of whom are confined to their beds for months at a time. Embedding clown doctors into health units could change the culture of the hospital for the better, senior psychologist Dr Alan Headey said.

"We shift towards 'we need to care for the whole person here, not just their bodies'. And that's really crucial," he said. Dr Headey said clown doctors worked on three different levels. "First is making kids feel better. They make them feel happy, improve their morale and crucially when maybe bad stuff is happening they make them feel less anxious, less worried ... they forget about their worries for a little while which is just fantastic," he said.

"The second thing when parents see their kids laughing and playing and coming up with creative idea, parents feel better, they feel less stressed. When parents are less stressed and start joking with kids they're able to help their children in creative ways and that's really crucial. Parents are the people who calm us down when we're children ... they make the difference. So helping kids and parents together is fantastic. The third thing which is sometimes missed ... it has a really big effect on staff ... we feel less stressed, we feel happier and when we're less stressed we can play around with patients.

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That helps them trust us better, they have better relationships with us, we can communicate more effectively." Dr Headey said previous studies have looked at what worked better at calming children down - interacting with clown doctors or preoperative anesthetics. "A clown doctor was more effective than a drug," he said. "One of the real questions is 'how does humor affect these children?' One of the things we know is it does seem to lower blood pressure ... it changes heart rate responses.Those physiological responses are telltale signs that anxiety is going down."