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Clown Doctors to a Bedside Near You – My Hyena Humor Health News

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Posted on Feb 14, 2007 in Healing Power of Humor

Comedy Cure: Clown Doctors bringing the Healing Power of Humor to you or a loved one.

So I was watching the Today show some time last week and saw Meridith Vieira dressed up in a clown’s outfit laughing away with a big red nose and bright red cheeks. She wasn’t under a circus tent. Instead, she was standing beside ill children in a New York city hospital. It was for a story she was doing on Clown Care “Clown Doctors” who are specially selected and trained professional performers who are trained to work in the sensitive hospital environment. They do bedside visits in various pediatric services including intensive care units, burn treatment centers, emergency rooms and much more. And, currently there are seventted Big Apple Circus Clown Care hospital clowning programs operating nationwide.

The idea of bringing joy and laughter to hospital patients is often ignored while care givers worry more about  a person’s physical wellbeing. However, people are more than just their physical bodies and we cannot ignore the fact that the mind and body are interlinked. When our spirit is up, when our mind is in a happy or relaxed state our physical bodies respond differently to stimuli and medication.

The following is an excerpt from the Clown Doctors website. Maybe the next time you aren’t too sure what you can do for a friend or loved one in the hospital you can find a clown doctor near you, or decide to become one yourself.

The Big Apple Circus Clown Care (SM) hospital clowning program brings laughter and joy to the bedsides of acutely and chronically ill children year round. The program was established in 1986 by Big Apple Circus Co-Founder Michael Christensen.


The Clown Doctors use parody to help demystify and simplify complicated medical procedures by performing their own “highly technical” clown medicine that includes red-nose transplants, kitty cat scans, chocolate milk transfusions, plate spinning platelet tests, and prescriptions of laughter.

There are currently seventeen Big Apple Circus Clown Care (SM) hospital clowning programs operating in cities nationwide. These host hospitals are located across the country in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Miami, New Haven, New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Since 2002, the Big Apple Circus’ Vaudeville Caravan program has been providing interactive, room-to-room entertainment to elderly residents of Chicago-area nursing homes. Our Clown Care performers use the same skills they use in children’s hospitals to empower and engage these seniors, many of whom are otherwise lonely, listless, and intensely bored. Performers use recognizable characters — like “Elvis,” a cowgirl, or an opera diva — to bring music, magic, and laughter where it is so very needed. We hope to expand this program to reach more elders in other cities in the coming years.

For more information on this humor heals health tip, checkout the Clown Doctor section of the Big Apple Circus website: http://www.bigapplecircus.org/CommunityPrograms/ClownCare/

If you find this information useful, please share it so that we can help spread the healing power of humor.

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