An excerpt from Peach Cobbler Is Not a Fruit.

Laughter is good medicine. I don’t merely believe that. I have prescribed it, inhaled it, survived by it, and, on more than one occasion, snorted it through my nose at profoundly inappropriate moments.

Medicine is serious business. Patients entrust their bodies, fears, secrets, and occasionally their entire futures to the care and judgment of their physicians. The work demands rational thought, scientific analysis, swift decision-making, emotional stamina, and a decent amount of humanity, often all before lunch. A doctor’s brain must remain alert and disciplined, yet mine also craved a reprieve: a clean internal purge, a way to sweep out the cobwebs and let my neurons resume firing with something resembling grace.

I discovered that laughter was one of nature’s most generous drug offerings: free, portable, available without a co-pay, and requiring no shady back-alley transaction. A good cackle does more than feel wonderful. It provides a physiological release, a blessed dumping of emotional baggage the body was never meant to carry indefinitely. Laughter releases endorphins, the body’s natural opioids, which can ease pain perception and produce a sense of well-being, not unlike the famous “runner’s high,” without requiring the unnecessary indignity of actual running. It stimulates dopamine and serotonin, those helpful little messengers of pleasure, reward, motivation, and emotional balance. Meanwhile, the endocrine system joins the party, dialing down the stress response by reducing cortisol and adrenaline, those hormonal troublemakers that keep the body revved long after the emergency has passed.

As if the “feel-good” response isn’t enough, science has demonstrated the physiologic response to laughter by studying participants viewing comic films. The results supported reduced stress responses, improved blood vessel function, increased pain tolerance, metabolic benefits, and improved mood, anxiety, and depressive symptoms.

After nearly thirty years of treating patients, I had countless opportunities to smile, chuckle, and, on the best days, surrender to the kind of doubled-over, breath-stealing, eye-watering convulsion no pharmacy has yet managed to bottle. Laughter reduced stress, restored perspective, and spared me from becoming one of those grim, humorless physicians who mistake solemnity for wisdom.

I have been told, more than once, that I have an infectious laugh. I consider that one of the few contagions I am proud to spread. My hope is that somewhere in these pages, you catch it too.

The subject matter did not need to arrive gift-wrapped as a joke. More often, the humor emerged from the ordinary machinery of being human: our bodies, appetites, embarrassments, vanities, desires, delusions, and desperate negotiations with gravity, age, sex, sugar, bowels, hormones, and the occasional uncooperative body part. Medicine, after all, is where human dignity and human plumbing meet, frequently while wearing the same flimsy gown.

The stories in these pages are not meant to mock suffering or diminish anyone’s private drama. They are composites, collisions, and collected specimens from the grand laboratory of the human condition, a condition from which none of us has been discharged. Details have been altered, identities protected, and dignity preserved as much as dignity can be preserved in a profession that asks people to describe their bowel habits before breakfast.

Patients can be funny. Doctors can be funny. Families can be funny. Bodies are hilarious, treacherous, miraculous contraptions with terrible timing and no respect for modesty. No amount of education, money, achievement, Botox, shapewear, or self-importance exempts any of us from the basic absurdity of living inside flesh.

To laugh at these moments is not cruel. It is recognition. It is relief. It is redemption. It is the sound we make when life exposes us as fragile, hopeful, ridiculous creatures trying to operate complicated equipment without an owner’s manual.

We have to live inside these bodies, after all. We might as well have some fun with them.

Climb aboard. The gown opens in the back.

Andrea Hayes is a retired endocrinologist, author, and speaker whose work brings uncommon candor and humor to the realities of medicine, illness, and the human body. After nearly three decades in clinical practice, including years leading a high-volume endocrine and diabetes center, she now writes and speaks about health care, chronic disease, physician burnout, patient behavior, and the often-absurd intersection between science and daily life.

Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a teenager, Hayes offers a rare perspective from both sides of the exam room, as physician, patient, survivor, and storyteller. Her forthcoming memoir, Floodline: Blessings and Betrayals of a Life in Medicine, explores illness, faith, betrayal, resilience, and reinvention. She is also the author of Peach Cobbler Is Not a Fruit, a humorous essay collection drawn from the endocrine trenches.

She writes on Substack and shares updates on her website, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.