Music

Doctors find Star Wars music helps during butt surgery

by Jeremy Mersereau

A long time ago (December 14th), in a heat-scorched galaxy far, far away (Australia), an ancient council known as the Endoscopic Knights published a secret (publicly-available) study.

This time-honored text detailed the council’s findings that when listening to epic soundtrack music, such as the Star Wars score, brave warriors navigate the human Death Star trench known as the colon more successfully, with a greater rate of detecting disturbances in the bowels.

“Akin to Luke Skywalker’s destruction of the Death Star despite being pursued by Darth Vader and TIE fighters, we trusted the Force to guide us through the murky colonic waters to locate and destroy polyps,” the tongue-in-cheek (not that cheek) study proclaims. “We must suspect the Force was also involved, enhancing our Force-sensitive abilities to detect polyps.”

Sounds like being an Australian gastroenterologist is a real stodgy, serious affair, as evidenced by this real illustration from the study:

“I… sense something. A presence I’ve not felt since…” – guy getting his second colonoscopy.

The study was based on 103 colonoscopies performed at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, during which the presiding endoscopists would flip a coin to determine whether or not they would listen to either Star Wars music or other popular music selected by the during the procedure. The “end” result? The polyp detection rate was 24% higher during the Star Wars colonoscopies.

Makes sense: If I’m going to shove a camera tube up an anus, I’d be more jazzed to pretend I’m Luke Skywalker navigating through the Death Star trench than Adele navigating the complexity of the human heart.