Magical Beliefs and Rituals in Modern Medicine Mr Alastair Graham

Magical Beliefs and Rituals in Modern Medicine

Mr Alastair J Graham

(Magdalen, 1985) Consultant Hand and Wrist Specialist, Buckinghamshire Hospitals

Pre-enlightenment Europe was awash with magical beliefs following supernatural narratives, physicians included. And there were accompanying rituals. With the emergence of rigorous study of anatomy, physiology and then pathology, unpredictable illnesses became easier to explain. Only then could treatment be rationalised. Even today while we have named and elucidated most diseases, many still defy treatment. Magical thoughts persist, bubbling dramatically into public rhetoric when faced with challenges posed by modern life, flowers tied to lampposts rather than at gravestones, love padlocks on bridge, coins in fountains, 13th-storey taboo in tower blocks, unorthodox antiviral protection from antifreeze to aprons. Linguistic and music psychologists tell us we are hard-wired for language, rhythm, and harmony – perhaps irrational supernatural beliefs are similarly innate, answering Questions of Existence smouldering in our consciousness for millennia.

In the 1930s the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard visited the Azande people of Sudan and found a water-tight medical belief system: people fell ill because of curses, the curses could be reversed by witchcraft and ritual, and the symptoms could be eased with herbal remedies. If treatment failed there were fail-safe explanations which he called “secondary elaborations”. There were no gaps in the narrative – all situations could be explained with no unanswered questions and no public anxiety. Compare this to our world of ‘never events’, hospital examiners, lessons learned: endless unpredictability and inexplicable events. Socio-anthropologists found identical oral traditions of disease narratives in other isolated population groups across the world. They explored folklore and ritual across diverse cultures in comparison with modern medical responses to uncertainty.

A protégé of Evans-Pritchard, the late Renée Fox also studied populations naive to Western medicine including the Azande in Sudan but also medical students at Cornell! She provocatively suggested that a medical school should train as much for dealing with uncertainty as for pursuit of knowledge. We face two major uncertainties in clinical medicine – diagnostic and treatment. Diagnosis is hidden within personal stories. In musculoskeletal medicine we now devote fewer teaching sessions to examination which feels concrete but yields little towards the diagnosis. After twenty-five years in hand clinics, I am still perplexed by symptoms on a daily basis and undoubtedly all other medical disciplines are the same. Many surgeons display intoleranceof-ambiguity on personality profiles, and find it unacceptable to sit on the fence; inappropriate responses to unexplained symptoms range from wrongly attributing symptoms to patient personality to ‘shoe-horning’ patients into the wrong diagnostic category. Renee Fox found these and many other instinctive yet irrational responses in her students. Despite our wealth of knowledge and rigorous training the narrative landscape of diagnostic, Western medicine has gaping holes. Treatment uncertainty also generates irrational beliefs and ritualistic behaviour. If treatment fails catastrophically, we have M&M meetings and we consult coroners, each with ritualistic elements. After a coroner’s verdict we feel a weight is lifted from our shoulders – the case is closed and life can go on. Other professions create ritual when faced with existential questions. They too build temple-like structures, wear costumes, create hierarchies, use obscure terms and join in ritualistic events: think of law courts, parliaments, universities or simply the rigid structure of mundane minuted meetings that pervade the adult world. These group activities have orders-of-service and elements of drama.

‘Magical’ beliefs appear when we face uncertainty or risk, and many doctors react with routine and ritual. Routine gives us a sense of stability. Embedded routine, particularly in groups, can become ritualised and gains superstitious importance. While rituals were traditionally defined as irrational (often in the context of religion) a more modern approach is to see certain activities as evolving from common-sense but then becoming ‘ritualised’. Until 1700, physicians, apothecaries and surgeons regularly consulted astrological almanacs when deciding on treatment; it is unclear when this disappeared from medical training. Are there ritualised elements in ward rounds, grand rounds, journal clubs, the WHO checklist, each of which aims to create order but magically seems to reveal truths or help avert harm?

Ancient Greeks used the Oracle at Delphi to help address profound issues of uncertainty. They inscribed three messages on the walls: Know Thyself (now articulated as epistemology, being able to tell between truth and myth in complex situations), Nothing to Excess (always sensible) and Surety Brings Ruin. Sometimes uncertainty should be accepted as a form of truth.

Be aware of the innate magical beliefs we and our patients invoke to help give a narrative to disease. Be aware of the effect of suppressing these beliefs in ourselves or denying them in our patients. Accept that having magical and irrational beliefs, creating stories with “secondary elaborations” and using rituals may be ancient and comforting ways of overcoming the anxiety of medical uncertainty.

“Treatment uncertainty also generates irrational beliefs and ritualistic behaviour