Taoyuan, Taiwan - People the world over spend a huge amount of money to see doctors and buy pills to stay healthy, but the best medicine can be found inside oneself and it is free of charge, according to an Indian-born doctor.

That medicine is laughter.

Since Madan Kataria, a doctor in Mumbai, India, decided to use laughter to improve health and launched the first laughter yoga club in 1995, his laughter yoga (LY) movement has spread like wildfire around the world.

"Now there are some 16,000 clubs throughout India, and another 6,000 in about 60 countries. My goal is have one million LY clubs around the world within ten years," he said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in Taoyuan, 20 kilometres west of Taipei.

Dr Kataria, 53, was in Taiwan to inspect Taiwan's 13 LY clubs, give a speech and attend a discussion on the benefits of laughter with Taiwan psychiatrists.

He was also scheduled to discuss with the Chen Ta-cheng, founder of the Taiwan Laughter Yoga Club, how to expand the LY movement to China.

On Friday morning, Dr Kataria joined two dozen Taiwan Laughter Yoga Club members in a park in Taoyuan to practise group laughter and share innovative ways to bring out a belly laugh.

One woman squatted, sticking up her fingers and pretending she was a firecracker. Other members stood around her and touched her fingers as if they were lighting up the firecracker.

When the woman shouted "Bang!," the other members dashed off laughing and screaming, like a bunch of kids playing hide-and-seek.

The half-hour session was a laughing party for everyone, with every member making faces or doing funny moves to get the others to laugh.

It looks easy, but when Dr Kataria started the LY movement, he met enormous difficulties.

"I hit upon the idea of using laughter yoga to improve health while writing an article on the benefits of laughter for my medical magazine My Doctor. So I went to a Mumbai park to ask morning exercisers if they wanted to form a laughter club. Only four agreed, but within one month, our members grew to 50," he said.

The club began by telling jokes to make each other laugh. Ten days later, they ran out of good jokes, so Dr Kataria designed movements to fake laughs in order to bring out real laughs.

"Many people thought it was silly to fake laugh, but as the movement spread, scientists all over the world supplied proof that fake laughs and real laughs have the same health effects," he said.

"Otto Warburg, the German who won the 1931 Nobel Prize for Physiology for his research in cancer, said that lack of oxygen is the cause of every cancer. So laughter is the best way to bring more oxygen to body cells," he noted.

Mankind has known the benefits of laughter since ancient times. In the West there is the saying: "Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone." In China, people say: "Laughter makes you look ten years younger, while crying turns your hair white."

According to Dr Kataria, laughing for ten minutes equals to 30 minutes' jogging in terms of health benefit.

Even after one has got into the habit of laughing through joining the laughter yoga club, one should continue joining the club's daily laughing session because only a laugh extended for ten minutes, which is belly laugh, has health benefits, and one cannot keep laughing loudly by oneself for ten minutes.

Dr Kataria began to travel around the world to promote the LY movement in 1999, first to the United States. But Germany became the first country outside India to launch a laughter yoga club.

In 2001, he shut his medical practice to set up Laughter Yoga International and focus on promoting laughter yoga full time.

"At first we did everything for free. Then my wife complained that our kitchen could not run on laughter, so I began to conduct seminars and training to earn some money," he chuckled.

The LY International, now moved to Bangalore, India, employs 15 staff and is financed by donations and the sale of Dr Kataria's book, Laugh for No Reason, and demonstration DVDs. He spends 70 per cent of his time travelling around the world to train laughter yoga club leaders.

His goal is to build five International Laughter Yoga Universities - one on each continent - plus a mobile university which will be a ship called SS Shanti - a Sanskrit word meaning peace - to train LY teachers and to spread peace around the world.

He plans to visit China in 2009 to spread LY because "Chinese people work very hard and they need to reduce stress through laughter yoga."

There are already seven to eight laughter clubs in China, founded by Zhang Li, a former company manager in Shezhen in southern China.

Zhang developed depression when his company lost money, so he contacted Chen Ta-cheng in 2006 to ask about laughter yoga.

After curing his depression with laughter yoga, Zhang shut his business and is now running a laughter therapy company to treat patients. (dpa)