CLOWNING AROUND IN HOSPITALS WORKS WONDERS
Courtesy of Hamodia
Doctors in Israel are beginning to believe in the power of clowning around.
Over the last few years, Israeli clowns have been popping into hospital operating rooms and intensive care units with balloons and kazoos in hand, teaming up with doctors to develop laughter therapies they say help with a variety of medical disorders.
This is not how things area done in most of the world’s hospitals. Clowns often visit pediatric wards to cheer up young patients, but in most places the clowning ends where the medicine begins. When it comes time for the child to get a shot or undergo surgery, the clowns step aside.
Israeli clowns thumb their shiny red noses at that approach. They quote studies which suggest that a clown’s participation in treatments can help patients—especially kids—endure painful procedures and speed their healing.
They say it’s time for the medical community to recognize medical clowns as legitimate paramedical practitioners, like occupational or physical therapists.
Israel’s hospital clowning guild, Dream Doctors, founded 10 years ago, is the leading advocate for infusing more medicine into the artistry.
“it’s not just putting on a red nose, floppy shoes, and playing a ukulele,” said Dr. Aurther Eidelman, recently retired chief of pediatrics at the Shaare Zedek Hospital in Yerushalayim, and chair of the Dream Doctors scientific committee. “We see medical clowns as an integral part of the health-care team.”
The idea behind the initiative is that clowns in simple costumes—no caked on makeup or squirting flowers—can parody the role of the doctor, making the hospital a less scary place for patients.
On a recent morning at the Yerushalayim medical center, one such clown cut short his coffee break when a nurse called to say a boy was being wheeled into surgery to fix a ruptured eardrum.
Dr. Subaba—the name is the Israeli version of “cool”—rushed up the stairwell and through the double doors into pre-op, greeting Aaron Marziano, 13. They’d met earlier that morning in the pediatric ward, where he’d performed imaginary surgery on the boy’s ear with a long kazoo.
As nurses prepped the boy for surgery, he quickly stretched nets around his floppy green shoes, threw on blue scrubs, and helped wheel Marziano into the operating room. The clown, not the anesthesiologist, placed the anesthesia mask over the boy’s face.
“Eight years ago, going in the operating room was science fiction,” said Dr. Sababa, who answers to his real name, Avi Cohen, when he’s out of his polka dot necktie and grapefruit vest.
Today, he estimated, a clown is present at about one out of five of the hospital’s full anesthesia surgeries for children. A study led by doctors there found that a clown’s presence in pre-op reduces the amount of anesthesia administered and speeds up a patient’s recovery time.
Of the 219 women who participated in another yearlong study, abouyt half received a surprise visit by a clown dressed as a bumbling chef. Dr. Shevach Friedler of Assaf Harofeh Medical Center said his study indicated that the laughter therapy might reduce stress or strengthen the immune system to increase the success rate of the treatment.
Another study, conducted by the head of pediatrics at a northern Israeli hospital, found that if there was a clown in the room, children with urinary tract infections didn’t need sedation to keep still during an imaging scan. The clown would make a deal with a young patient that both would simply freeze during the scan. It worked: Out of 142 children studied, 137 did not need sedation, eliminating the risks of complications and side effects that often come with sedatives.
“In the last one or two years, there has been hard science, evidence-based data, generated that this does make a difference,” Edelman said.
About 25 Israeli medical centers keep professional clowns on hand. One Israeli university offers what it calls the world’s first full-time degree program for medical clowning, part of an effort to standardize training for the profession.
Israeli clowns and their physician partners are presenting their studies in international medical conventions and meeting with hospital administrators around the globe.
In the US, reactions to the Israeli clowning philosophy are mixed.
But in Europe, Eidelman said, hospitals are more willing to let clowns incorporate the Israeli approach into their acts. This summer, clowns fro Holland, Brazil, Germany, Russia, the US, and Canada shadowed Israeli clowns at a hospital in the northern city of Haifa.
One Dutch clown peeked into an examination room where her Israeli colleague hopped up onto an examination table next to a wailing child with a needle in his arm. The Israeli clown inflated a white medical latex glove into a makeshift balloon animal.
The boys’ shrieks turned into giggles.