Power of Suggestion

It is the usual practice in my institute that the resident doctors and interns write the clinical history of patients presenting to the outpatient clinic. Then the patients are examined by senior staff members, who confirm the history obtain additional details if available. This saves time, which is essential if we have to see more than a hundred patients in three and a half hours. But it has its downside too. If the person writing the history has a bad handwriting, it becomes quite troublesome to understand the understand history. One of my house officers has quite bad handwriting. That day I found a number of case papers with his handwriting and decided to do something about it. I called him, gave him a piece of unlined paper and asked him to write a couple of lines of clinical notes. When he had written enough, I took the paper and inspected it. There were three lines of text on that paper, going in three different directions. The letters looked Chinese, while the language was actually English. The size of the letters was varying widely. Then I wrote below his text whatever he had written, getting his help to read whatever I could not read. I wrote in straight parallel lines, with the letters of even size and looking like English letters. Then I gave the piece of paper and said "Study this. If you get any idea from that, I will be happy. If not, forget the whole thing and move on." He went away looking at the paper. He came back after half an hour, with another piece of paper, similar to the one we had written on initially. He gave it to me. He had written the same text on it, now in straight parallel lines, and legible print. "That is wonderful" I said. He went away happy. Now it remains to be seen if it was a temporary change, or a permanent one. I will know in the next outpatient clinic.