Revered sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Melbourne GP Dr Vyom Sharma shares this view enthusiastically. “Magic is just science we’re unfamiliar with,” he says.

Unusually, he’s an expert in both. The engaging health commentator, who pops up on The Drum and The Project, is a jobbing magician on the side who has appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe and made the grand finals of Australia’s Got Talent. He’ll pop up again, like a rabbit out of a hat, in the Headliners show at this year’s Melbourne Magic Festival, alongside Melbourne export Simon Coronel and American star Dom Chambers.

Sharma fell under the spell when a fellow student at med school performed an astonishing trick for him. “I just lost my shit and had to find out how this thing was done,” he recalls. Lucky for him, the State Library of Victoria has the world’s largest public-access collection of magic books and periodicals. “There began my parallel education alongside medicine.”

He reveals it’s a popular pursuit in the field. “The people who get interested in magic are usually very scientifically minded. They love generating hypotheses, learning about the world and the mechanics of things. Once they find out the underlying principle of the prop or the psychology behind a magic trick, they’re thrilled.”

It’s all about marvel. “My eyes light up in the same way when I’m describing something medical as they do when I show an amazing illusion,” Sharma says. “And with something like medicine, this is a field that has astonishment and wonder baked in.

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“There’s this psychological principle called the illusion of explanatory depth, where we all think we understand things in far more detail than we actually do,” he adds, proffering the phones we’re speaking on as an example.

“If you ask most people how it is that you and I are talking right now, beyond sound waves hitting the phone, most of us, including me, have no understanding.”

Like a two-way mirror trick, Sharma says, magical confidence bolsters his medical practice. “You have to engage people, make them care and establish some level of trust. Sometimes you need to give people something a bit more persuasive than just the facts, be it a story, or emotions, or whatever it is.”