Laughter not the best medicine after all

Laughter is not the best medicine, that's what a scientist has pointed out.

In a study, Dr. Margaret Stuber, a psychiatry professor at University of California Los Angeles Medical School, studied whether laughter helped patients.

After analyses, she found that distraction and mood improvement helped, but she could not find a benefit for laughter alone, reports Discovery News.

"No study has shown that laughter produces a direct health benefit," Baltimore neuroscientist Robert Provine, who has studied laughter for decades.

Provine added, largely because it's hard to detach laughter from just good feelings. However, he stresses it doesn't really matter: "Isn't the fact that laughter feels good when you do it, isn't that enough?"

"Laughter above all else is a social thing," Provine said. "The requirement for laughter is another person."

Provine, a professor with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, added: "All language groups laugh 'ha-ha-ha' basically the same way. Whether you speak Mandarin, French or English, everyone will understand laughter. ... There's a pattern generator in our brain that produces this sound."