By Mark Henderson

Sam suffers with rheumatoid arthritis and wants some advice about performing magic tricks.

There are times in our lives, if we are old or young, that our hands don't work quite as we need them to. Some of us develop arthritic difficulties at an old age, but really it can strike at any age. I am going to share some tips with you that can help you to keep performing your magic, and keep getting great reactions.

Recently Sam wrote to us saying,

"I've been performing magic for about 16 years now and also been a customer of MoM for a very long time. Unfortunately, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis about 3 months ago and being only 27 it's a bit of a shock. My fingers are a lot better than they were after being put on meds and I'm being hopeful that I will not have to hang my deck or coins up just yet or at least for a little while. It's an unfortunate thing, but for something I can't change I'm not going to let it get me down too much."

That is the Spirit Sam! When one door closes, another one opens, even if your finger dexterity is diminishing, you can still perform miracles with your hands. With a little bit of creative thinking, you can adapt your magic tricks to achieve the same outcomes, just taking a slightly different route to get there.

Top tips for adapting your magic to cope with arthritis.

As with any medical issue, it's important that you seek advice from your doctor. Here's some tips to help.

▪ Instead of performing a riffle shuffle in your hands, that can put unnecessary stresses on your joints, you can do a simple process of cutting the cards or mixing them on a tabletop to shuffle the cards.

▪ If you are having difficulty holding a coin in classic palm, try altering it to finger palm.

▪ Ryan Schutz's Miracles Without Moves has a plethora of mind blowing card magic tricks that use little to no sleight of hand what so ever, and still produce jaw dropping reactions.

▪ A memorised deck such as Mnemonica or other stacked deck can achieve actual miracles in your spectator's eyes with no crafty card moves at all.

▪ There is a whole world of mentalism and mind reading out there that is totally unrelated to any sleight of hand. You can always use your head if your hands start to fail you!

Sometimes life throws us a curve ball, and sometimes it hands us lemons. Either way, you can use them to finish off your chop cup routine.