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Playing Video Games Makes For Better Surgeons
Steve Wallach writes "ABC News on line is reporting that surgeons that play video games at least three hours a week make 37% fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and complete the surgery 27% faster than their non-video game playing colleagues. '"I use the same hand-eye coordination to play video games as I use for surgery," said Dr. James "Butch" Rosser, 49, who demonstrated the results of his study Tuesday at Beth Israel Medical Center.'"
Wonder if this is related, but it might be that surgeons need practice at maintaining attention on something; like everyone else.
The more practice you get concentrating intensely on hand-eye coordination based activities, the better you get. Hey, I should know. I started out sucking rocks at Quake and ALL FPS, but kept on playing and and getting fragged and managed to figure out how to hold my own, just barely.
Just that since there aren't so many surgical procedures to practice on, playing games are a means of tuning the hand eye coordination. A friend of mine plays a lot of squash for the same reason (although he's pretty careful of his fingers and wrists)
screenshots are often taken and placed in the medical record... it's not only good documentation, it makes it harder for a disgruntled patient to come back later and sue, saying the appendix wasn't infected and the surgery wasn't necessary, etc; it's not only in the path report, it's right there in the chart in brilliant color.
Some surgeons, particularly plastic surgeons, are practically professional photographers... I've often had them come into the ER to sew faces of drunk drivers and bar-fight participants back together. The first thing they do is take a bunch of pictures. The reason why is pretty simple: A before/after picture comparison can be a real case-breaker for a plaintiff's attorney. Even with the most-expert plastic surgeon working on you, almost every wound scars to one degree or another... the before/after pics really put it into perspective for a jury.
A picture is truly worth a thousand words.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.