The Whispering Doctor

Source: John Noonan / Unsplash

By Treena Orchard and Bronwen McVeigh

Auto-Sensory Meridian Response is everywhere right now: SNL skits, Grammy-nominated indie albums, and celebrity performances. ASMR is a phenomenon in which audio or visual triggers, like delicate tapping sounds or soft whispers, create a pleasurable tingling feeling called paresthesia. Medical role-play videos are among the most popular ASMR content, with “doctors” staring into the camera and leaving spaces in the dialogue to “listen” to the viewer’s imagined responses.

These practitioners don’t tap frantically onto computer keyboards; they slowly scrawl words on a notepad. Relaxing soundscapes replace blaring medical machines and gentle illumination replaces harsh hospital lighting.

Watching these videos can produce therapeutic benefits akin to mindfulness, and they might alleviate insomnia better than melatonin. Beyond soothing anxious viewers, we contend that ASMR medical roleplay videos may help reduce the anxiety associated with medical encounters and enhance peoples’ sense of agency over their well-being. Adopting this content as part of medical practice might also be a promising, cost-effective way to meet patient needs without stressing over-stretched healthcare systems.

Medical Exams, but Make Them Chill

Although a YouTuber wielding a stethoscope can’t offer medical advice, they’re not the only ones creating ASMR videos. Content that features actual medical interactions by physicians—Dr. James Kelly's demonstration of a Cranial Nerve Exam, for example—is also popular; that video alone has racked up over 44 million views.

Studies demonstrate that the precisely executed actions characteristic of ASMR content resemble a state of consciousness in which an individual feels utterly engrossed in a single, often repetitive, task or experience. This includes medical routines and rituals, including some of the most dreaded or triggering aspects of health-related encounters. This includes things like providers (over)explaining information, patients being asked difficult questions, focused attention on the body, percussive sounds, and calm, measured speaking in interpersonal scenarios.

In this way, ASMR seems to function as a meditative practice that intersects with and complicates, in interesting and therapeutic ways, our cultural preoccupation with mindfulness and the relentless pursuit of bodily and mental optimization. In a forthcoming book chapter about Phoebe Bridgers’s invocation of ASMR aesthetics in her music, the second author demonstrates how this form of embodiment feels like a liberating way to resist the sometimes suffocating boundaries of both body and health that characterize modern society.

Should Doctors Whisper Too?

ASMR medical role-play content offers the unique perspective of (mainly) laypeople who find pleasure in medical exams and perform versions of care that millions of viewers have flocked to. Could this content also help clinicians learn to be more present and personal in their work with patients, thus catalyzing systemic change within the healthcare system?

Many ASMR seekers see these practices as a way to transform stereotypes about attending a hospital or clinic. For instance, Reddit user GentleLiASMR writes that medical role-play ASMR is “a powerful way to reframe a scary or intimidating situation like a doc’s appointment into something that is, for some, something relaxing.”

Advocates within medical education—most notably from the field of Medical Humanities—have championed these efforts to teach often-ignored social aspects of the medical profession in new ways. Interventions include incorporating theater into medical education to allow students to hone their communication skills in low-pressure situations. Others laud the field of narrative medicine for its ability to broaden perspective and encourage empathy.

In a bemused piece about watching ASMR medical parodies, physicians Amish and Nutin Kumar Ahuja note, “It can feel absurd, as an actual clinician, to watch a layperson on YouTube spend 30 minutes auscultating the air. But it also can be captivating to see one’s daily work rendered so skeletally and to recall that there is something potent there, even in the bare bones.”

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What feels like lighthearted content may reflect a broader social desire for more attentive presence and relaxation strategies for patients. ASMR medical role-plays thus offer insightful lessons about how we might infuse greater empathy and attention into healthcare settings.

These role-play videos are not yet a pedagogical tool for medical students or healthcare providers, but they underscore something that dominant medical systems often resist: the fact that clinical care is not just a cerebral profession grounded in technical skill, but also a profoundly interpersonal role in which a practitioner’s demeanor impacts the patient. Meaningfully and creatively engaging with ASMR medical role-plays in the world of medicine would require educational and healthcare institutions to rethink their dominant self-image as purely rational and impersonal—to reconsider how institutions can value and support emotional labor as well.

Further research into this interdisciplinary frontier of digital health and content creation is needed to provide substantive evidence of the therapeutic benefits of ASMR for patients and providers. It’s an exciting and innovative field of study with tremendous potential to help reshape the way that multiple facets of healthcare are delivered and experienced.

Bronwen McVeigh, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary scholar with training in cultural history, sound studies, medical humanities, and qualitative research methods. Her collaborative research practice integrates archival research, ethnographic approaches, and feminist media studies to closely examine different aspects of narrative medicine as well as the affective, narrative, and performative dimensions of ASMR medical role-play.