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Just about every parent has had the dreaded experience of dealing with a child’s apprehension and anxiety during a visit to the doctor, dentist, or hospital facility.
In today’s world of overloaded schedules and the hectic demands of high patient volume—with health-care professionals hastily grabbing charts and focusing on proceedure, medical history, ailment, or treatment—it can be easy to forget or just plain overlook a child’s intimidation.
Think back for a moment to your own childhood visits to the doctor. Remember the overpowering sense of vulnerability that swept through your consciousness as you surveyed a roomful of odd-looking things that might be used to poke, prod, and hammer you? Do you remember gazing at that doctor in the odd-looking sci-fi coat, holding that giant needle that was about to stab you?
The practice of medicine has advanced by leaps and bounds through the years, but children’s trepidations remain as real and intense as they were when your great grandparents were young. And, unfortunately, many of these conditioned fear responses can follow an individual all the way through adulthood and well into old age.
Traditionally, pediatricians have attempted everything they can— from hanging brightly colored posters on the wall to giving out lollipop rewards following successful exams—to alleviate the fears associated with a child’s visit to the doctor. Today it’s not unusual to find medical offices with elevated toy trains, Nickelodeon on the “big screen,” and state-of-the-art video games in the waiting room. Anything that can be done to reduce patient stress can have a positive impact on a medical practice. Most likely, you have your favorite techniques already in place, and we don’t want to change those. Our aim, through Side-Fx, is to provide you with new and unexpected methods that challenge you to think outside the box and ultimately make your patient interaction more productive, healing, and calming.
The purpose of Side-Fx is to provide the health-care professional, with tools and techniques specifically designed to divert a child’s mind from the many fears associated with a visit to the doctor. By creating a surprise-filled, magical atmosphere for your patients, their habitual nervousness and concern are overcome by wonder and amazement.
Scott and Harrison have spent countless hours researching, creating, and adapting a unique collection of illusions, puzzles, and conundrums specifically designed to assist health-care professionals in distracting and disarming apprehensive patients. In both the book and the DVD you will find numerous tricks, ploys, and gambits that are easy to perform and reproduce. The simple magical methods should help put the little people, seen in your practice, at ease—and, hopefully, they’ll see the clinician more as a person and not as a terrifying mad scientist. Imagine transforming a troubled or even disorderly patient into a receptive, captivated, happy child who isn’t undermining your goals but cheerfully facilitating them instead.
We are aware that the busy health-care provider doesn’t have the time to collect props and learn intricate sleight-of-hand techniques. Therefore, we created effects that can be quickly mastered with everyday items found in most examining rooms and offices.
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