Dr. Kate Scannell, Syndicated columnist; First published in print: 05/12/2012
It was a dark and stormy day. I sat in an overlit hallway of a sprawling urban hospital, anxiously waiting to be ushered into a conference room filled with doctors and administrators. Under considerable stress, I looked down at the notes in my hands, reviewing them one final time in preparation for my presentation. That's when three clowns approached me -- and, no, they were not members of the hospital staff.
I looked up and stared into their painted faces. One clown withdrew a squeaky rubber pen from her enormous pocket and, with dramatic flourish, made two giant check marks on a pink card. After her clown colleagues nodded approval, she handed the "ticket" to me and said: "We're citing you on two counts."
To be frank, I hesitated about engaging with these clowns. After all, I was a serious doctor on a serious mission, preparing for a tense interaction, and I didn't have time for, well, clowning around. Still, I was surrounded by three clowns, and the last thing I needed before my meeting was a lapel-flower squirt of water in my face.
So I smiled politely and read aloud the charges on my citation: "Feet are not big enough" and "Gathering too much dust."
I smiled again, looked at my watch, and wondered why it was taking so long for the conference moderator to summon me. "Thank you," I said to the clowns.
But their clown radar seemed to sense -- accurately -- that I remained distracted and not all-together mirthful.
"You waiting to get into the conference?" one of them persisted.
I replied affirmatively, at which point they began handing to me rainbow-colored "Conference Passes." Each pass bore a riddle on one side and an inspirational quote on the other. For example, one pass read: "What is more amazing than a talking dog? A spelling bee!" On its backside, Lord Byron advised, "Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine."
I appreciated the corny jokes -- all 10 of them. Still, I didn't want to be caught guffawing when suddenly called into conference.
"Something's still wrong," one of them decided, "because you're not really smiling."
"Yes," another agreed, "we'll just have to draw your blood to diagnose the problem."
After frenetically scrawling on a piece of paper, they presented me with their "drawing" of blood droplets. I laughed and felt suddenly lighter, acutely disburdened of worry.
I had to know who these clowns were. They were strikingly different from the clowns with which I'd been familiar and, often, upset: the annoying class clown I suffered throughout grade school; just about every commercial circus clown I'd seen; the demonic and maniacal clowns in horror films and Stephen King novels.
"That's because we're 'hospital clowns,' " they explained, professionally trained artists upholding a rich tradition of medical clowning that stretched back to the ancient Greeks. They drew clear distinctions between the therapeutic, uplifting, and relational aims of hospital clowning -- and the shock-and-awe, entertainment objectives of many clowns in popular culture. Collectively, they regularly witnessed firsthand how therapeutic clowning helped to ease the suffering and isolation of hundreds of hospitalized patients -- anguishing and languishing adults, as well as sick and distraught children.
One of the hospital clowns was Shobi Dobi -- aka, Shobhana Schwebke -- who since 1995 has been editor and publisher of Hospital Clown Newsletter, an International Publication for Clowns in Community and World Service. She regaled me with information about the global reach of therapeutic clowning and its rather impressive academic underpinnings.
She also critiqued a fabled British "study" published in 2008 by Nursing Standard magazine that purportedly documented a collective disdain for clowns among 250 hospitalized children who'd been surveyed by university researchers. Three-ring-circus headlines appeared in the popular media after one researcher concluded: "We found clowns are universally disliked by children." To this day, that study is often upheld as an authoritative reference on the subject of "coulrophobia" (fear of clowns). Still, you cannot locate survey data to substantiate the researcher's claim -- no laughing matter to an academic doctor or hospital clown. Indeed, the Nursing Standard report runs a mere five paragraphs long and is completely devoid of statistics.
When it came time for me to leave, Shobi gave me her card (yes, I made sure it wasn't printed with disappearing ink), and she directed me to her website for additional information (www.hospitalclown.com). "Someday," I said, "I'd like to write a column about therapeutic clowning when some relevant topical event occurs."
Finally -- two years later -- that event occurred when it was widely reported last week that McGill University Health Centre in Montreal was bringing in the clowns to determine whether they could improve fertility rates for women. McGill officials wanted to see if they could "reproduce" the findings in a 2011 study published in Fertility and Sterility, which suggested that clowning around might sometimes lead to pregnancy.
In that report, among 219 women undergoing in vitro fertilization, fully 36 percent of those who'd been entertained by a medical clown became pregnant -- compared with only 20 percent of the clown-deprived women. The main operative theory was that laughter and clown therapy reduced physiological stress that interfered with reproductive functions and fertility treatment outcomes.
I ran to my filing cabinet and withdrew my "Clown File." Inside were my faded pink citation, Shobi's card, my timeworn interview notes, and those 10 old jokes -- that never really get old. I called Shobi to discuss McGill's plans in light of the fertility study.
She, of course, was not surprised; therapeutic clown intervention made perfect sense as a fertility treatment. As her website sagely counsels: "No one expects a clown to be profound. No one expects a clown to be anything but funny. Look again! The clown will catch you off guard and speak directly to your heart -- make you laugh at yourself, and weep with the world."
Wouldn't it be funny if laughter turned out to be the best medicine after all?
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Kate Scannell is a Bay Area physician and author of the novel "Flood Stage."
© Copyright 2012, Kate Scannell
It was a dark and stormy day. I sat in an overlit hallway of a sprawling urban hospital, anxiously waiting to be ushered into a conference room filled with doctors and administrators. Under considerable stress, I looked down at the notes in my hands, reviewing them one final time in preparation for my presentation. That's when three clowns approached me -- and, no, they were not members of the hospital staff.
I looked up and stared into their painted faces. One clown withdrew a squeaky rubber pen from her enormous pocket and, with dramatic flourish, made two giant check marks on a pink card. After her clown colleagues nodded approval, she handed the "ticket" to me and said: "We're citing you on two counts."
To be frank, I hesitated about engaging with these clowns. After all, I was a serious doctor on a serious mission, preparing for a tense interaction, and I didn't have time for, well, clowning around. Still, I was surrounded by three clowns, and the last thing I needed before my meeting was a lapel-flower squirt of water in my face.
So I smiled politely and read aloud the charges on my citation: "Feet are not big enough" and "Gathering too much dust."
I smiled again, looked at my watch, and wondered why it was taking so long for the conference moderator to summon me. "Thank you," I said to the clowns.
But their clown radar seemed to sense -- accurately -- that I remained distracted and not all-together mirthful.
"You waiting to get into the conference?" one of them persisted.
I replied affirmatively, at which point they began handing to me rainbow-colored "Conference Passes." Each pass bore a riddle on one side and an inspirational quote on the other. For example, one pass read: "What is more amazing than a talking dog? A spelling bee!" On its backside, Lord Byron advised, "Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine."
I appreciated the corny jokes -- all 10 of them. Still, I didn't want to be caught guffawing when suddenly called into conference.
"Something's still wrong," one of them decided, "because you're not really smiling."
"Yes," another agreed, "we'll just have to draw your blood to diagnose the problem."
After frenetically scrawling on a piece of paper, they presented me with their "drawing" of blood droplets. I laughed and felt suddenly lighter, acutely disburdened of worry.
I had to know who these clowns were. They were strikingly different from the clowns with which I'd been familiar and, often, upset: the annoying class clown I suffered throughout grade school; just about every commercial circus clown I'd seen; the demonic and maniacal clowns in horror films and Stephen King novels.
"That's because we're 'hospital clowns,' " they explained, professionally trained artists upholding a rich tradition of medical clowning that stretched back to the ancient Greeks. They drew clear distinctions between the therapeutic, uplifting, and relational aims of hospital clowning -- and the shock-and-awe, entertainment objectives of many clowns in popular culture. Collectively, they regularly witnessed firsthand how therapeutic clowning helped to ease the suffering and isolation of hundreds of hospitalized patients -- anguishing and languishing adults, as well as sick and distraught children.
One of the hospital clowns was Shobi Dobi -- aka, Shobhana Schwebke -- who since 1995 has been editor and publisher of Hospital Clown Newsletter, an International Publication for Clowns in Community and World Service. She regaled me with information about the global reach of therapeutic clowning and its rather impressive academic underpinnings.
She also critiqued a fabled British "study" published in 2008 by Nursing Standard magazine that purportedly documented a collective disdain for clowns among 250 hospitalized children who'd been surveyed by university researchers. Three-ring-circus headlines appeared in the popular media after one researcher concluded: "We found clowns are universally disliked by children." To this day, that study is often upheld as an authoritative reference on the subject of "coulrophobia" (fear of clowns). Still, you cannot locate survey data to substantiate the researcher's claim -- no laughing matter to an academic doctor or hospital clown. Indeed, the Nursing Standard report runs a mere five paragraphs long and is completely devoid of statistics.
When it came time for me to leave, Shobi gave me her card (yes, I made sure it wasn't printed with disappearing ink), and she directed me to her website for additional information (www.hospitalclown.com). "Someday," I said, "I'd like to write a column about therapeutic clowning when some relevant topical event occurs."
Finally -- two years later -- that event occurred when it was widely reported last week that McGill University Health Centre in Montreal was bringing in the clowns to determine whether they could improve fertility rates for women. McGill officials wanted to see if they could "reproduce" the findings in a 2011 study published in Fertility and Sterility, which suggested that clowning around might sometimes lead to pregnancy.
In that report, among 219 women undergoing in vitro fertilization, fully 36 percent of those who'd been entertained by a medical clown became pregnant -- compared with only 20 percent of the clown-deprived women. The main operative theory was that laughter and clown therapy reduced physiological stress that interfered with reproductive functions and fertility treatment outcomes.
I ran to my filing cabinet and withdrew my "Clown File." Inside were my faded pink citation, Shobi's card, my timeworn interview notes, and those 10 old jokes -- that never really get old. I called Shobi to discuss McGill's plans in light of the fertility study.
She, of course, was not surprised; therapeutic clown intervention made perfect sense as a fertility treatment. As her website sagely counsels: "No one expects a clown to be profound. No one expects a clown to be anything but funny. Look again! The clown will catch you off guard and speak directly to your heart -- make you laugh at yourself, and weep with the world."
Wouldn't it be funny if laughter turned out to be the best medicine after all?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kate Scannell is a Bay Area physician and author of the novel "Flood Stage."
© Copyright 2012, Kate Scannell