Magical Thinking: How Learning to Act Like a Magician Can Make You a Better Physician.

Abstract

For most of history, the line between magic and medicine was blurred. Before there was a pathophysiologic understanding of disease, there was little distinction between a magician and a physician. Both may wave their hands, utter some Latin-sounding words, produce a potion, and promise to make something (a coin or an ailment) disappear. Still today, providers who have successfully reduced a nursemaid’s elbow or who have made vertigo vanish with a canalith repositioning maneuver have borne witness to the healing power of medical sleight of hand. Recently, the use of magic at the bedside has seen a renaissance of sorts. In a 2017 review, Lam et al1 described many ways providers are incorporating magic in medicine, ranging from teaching patients magic tricks for physical therapy2 to its use as humor therapy as a prophylactic anxiolytic for patients.3,4 As a professional magician and a pediatrician, I have seen how magic and medicine intersect. Whereas I occasionally use a trick to calm an anxious child before an examination, I use the skills of how a magician approaches an audience in every patient encounter. Over the last decade, I have taught over 3000 providers how learning to think and act like a magician, even without doing a magic trick, can improve their ability to connect with patients. In this perspectives article, I will summarize how health care providers can implement 3 skills long used by magicians, those of misdirection, patter, and force, to build rapport and ultimately increase their ability to perform an examination. Nearly the whole art of sleight of hand depends on the art of misdirection. > Harlan Tarbell5 Chabris and Simmons6 demonstrated in their landmark invisible gorilla studies that when participants … Address correspondence to Michael B. Pitt, MD, 2450 Riverside Ave, M653, Minneapolis, MN 55454. E-mail: mbpitt{at}umn.edu