Karaoke Therapy

I had terrible nasal congestion and knew it was going to be a difficult night. But it was also our last night in Singapore, and I had been really looking forward to going out for karaoke. Despite not being in the best of health, I convinced my wife that we should go anyway.

We took a pleasant 20-minute walk from our hotel to the nearest karaoke bar. The next 50 minutes were spent singing and dancing to our favorite songs, after which we walked back to the hotel, nicely rounding off our Singapore trip.

To my surprise, by the time we returned, my nasal congestion was completely gone. No medicine I know of could have worked that fast. Singing and dancing made us happy—and when we are happy, our bodies respond. Hormones are released, biochemical changes occur, and somehow everything starts working better than any pill.

I’m sharing this experience in case anyone suffering from nasal congestion wants to try what I now call karaoke therapy. Of course, pharmaceutical companies would never recommend it—they’d lose business. And no doctor would suggest it either. Imagine going to a clinic with nasal congestion and being told, “Go sing and dance at a karaoke bar.” You’d probably think the doctor was a quack.

When medicine doesn’t work, we go back to the doctor for a new treatment. But imagine karaoke didn’t work for you. Would you go back to the doctor? And would the doctor ask, “Did you sing joyfully? Did you dance? Were you happy?” These, after all, would be the prerequisites for getting better. If you didn’t do them properly, you’d be told to go back and try again. Of course, no doctor would ever say this.

A karaoke bar wouldn’t fund a clinical study either. There’s a classic free-rider problem: why would one bar spend a million dollars on research when every karaoke bar would benefit for free?

So this blog post may be the only way to spread this newly discovered knowledge.