Like a real-life, Latin American version of that Adult Swim comedy “Children’s Hospital,” Argentina has just past a new law that requires specially trained clowns to be available in an effort to help treat young patients.

As reported by The Associated Press, Andres Kogan, a pediatrician who oversees a hospital program which uses clowns, announced on Friday that the law passed in May would be implemented in the coming months.

It’s not just about laughter being the best medicine either. As Kogan informs, clowns have a kind of covert function aside from just making people feel better about having to be in a hospital.

Children who might be shy around doctors will tell their ailments to a clown, and maybe even say if they have suffered any abuse that should be noted. And even if the kids don’t speak, the clowns bring out a smile.

Case in point: a 9-year-old boy named Alejo Lacone, who was left paralyzed after being hit by a car back in March and cannot speak due to having received a tracheotomy, starts to put on a happy face whenever the clowns goof around before him at the Central Hospital of Pediatrics where he is staying.

The hospital director Carlos Kambourian said, "The clowns put on their noses and invite you to play with them."

This method of clown medicine is actually based on a therapy used by Miami Children's Hospital. And it also sounds a lot like what Patch Adams, the real-life doctor and activist who inspired the Robin Williams movie, was up to with all those balloons and rubber noses.

In a 2011 interview in Natural News the good doctor sounded like he’d lost his sense of humor, saying, “In another 25 years the demise of the human race will be unstoppable” and that the environment was shot.

Above everything he seemed to be most upset that his dream of running a free hospital had not yet come to pass: “When they made the movie about me, they promised that my free hospital would become a reality. It is the only reason I agreed to do it, but it never happened."

Patch might want to look into to taking a trip down to Argentina and volunteering at a children’s hospital in Buenos Aires, which of course has universal health coverage.