TED Talks Daily
How can creativity help us heal? A doctor and a cartoonist answer | Amy Baxter and Navied Mahdavian
07 Jun 2025
When medicine mixes with metaphor, what kind of healing transpires? In this unexpected meeting of minds, physician Amy Baxter shares her innovative approach to treating pain, while cartoonist Navied Mahdavian explores how he traces its deeper meaning. From punchlines to pain scales, they reveal how drawing can be diagnostic and why medicine might just need a touch more whimsy. (This conversation is part of "TED Intersections," a series featuring thought-provoking conversations between experts navigating the ideas shaping our world.)For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. TED Intersections is back for a second season. This original series features unscripted conversations between TED speakers and experts taking on subjects at the intersection of their expertise.
In today's conversation, Navid Madhavian, a New Yorker cartoonist and writer, sits down with physician Amy Baxter to answer the question, how do you navigate pain? You'll be amazed by the connections they make between telling stories on paper, treating physical pain, and how the act of healing manifests in unexpected ways. That's up next.
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every artist will say their medium is the highest art form, but they're wrong, because cartooning is the highest art form, because you can say so much with so little, and with just like a few lines, you can express happiness and smugness and sadness.
Because every time I am drawing something, I mean, I find that I'm recreating the cartoon on my face, like I'm trying, I'm expressing it on my face, exactly, contouring my face as I'm drawing it, and there's constant like the erasing, and until I get that expression.
One of the things I like about it and being here at TED Next is the intersections between, like when I was asked to sit down with you, I was like, I'm going to be talking to a doctor. I don't know. Like, I don't know what I'm going to be talking about. But then as I started thinking about it, like realizing that there were those overlaps.
Yeah, I think that's one of the things that the people I've met are really good at is finding threads and then sort of pulling them until you both come to the place where you're together. One thing I thought was interesting about our intersection is that most of my life and my scientific work has been kind of in chunks.
It's like I get interested in this thing and I do the thing and I publish the paper or whatever and then I move on to the next chunk. And I wondered when you make a book or when you even make one cartoon, does that exercise whatever either demon is pushing you or whatever creative nugget? Or do you still keep a thread that goes through all of them?
I was going to make a joke about the demon, where it makes it sound much more dramatic, but I think the demon is this desire to be liked, and for people to laugh at what I'm doing. But the book and the cartoons are really different, because the cartoons, you're just doing one after another, and you just kind of turn them out.
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