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Med Students Get Training In Second Life Hospitals
Hugh Pickens writes "Discover Magazine reports that although medical simulations have been around for a long time, medical schools like Imperial College London are starting to use virtual hospitals in Second Life so students can learn their way around an O.R. before they enter the real thing. The students can also test their knowledge in the Virtual Respiratory Ward by interviewing patient avatars, ordering tests, diagnosing problems, and recommending treatment. 'The real innovation in SL clinical simulations is that they bring people together in a clinical space — you are standing next to an avatar who is a real patient, and the doctor avatar to your right is a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and the nurse to your left is at the University of Pennsylvania hospital,' says John Lester, the Education and Healthcare Market Developer at Linden Labs. The most significant benefit of SL training may be the cost. Real-life training facilities require thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars to build and maintain, while SL simulation rooms can be created for minimal costs, and accessed from anywhere in the world for the price of an internet connection. SL can also expose students to situations that a standard academic program can't duplicate: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions,' says Colleen Lin. 'When you're resuscitating a dummy in real life, it looks like a dummy. But you can program an avatar to look like it's choking or having a heart attack, and it looks more real to the student responsible for resuscitating it.'"
I am not a doctor but I have trained as on in Second Life.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This should come in handy for doctors trained this way when a blue, eight-foot tall hermaphroditic troll shows up at a hospital emergency room complaining of chest pains.
Despite being incredibly skeptical of such substitutes for a first life this does seem like a ridiculously good idea for filling such a gap in education given what a leap it must be between classroom knowledge and actually dealing with real world patients.
I must admit that I'm just utterly amazed that someone's actually thought of a way to use second life that isn't utterly futile and useless.
The inevitable dialogue between totally overworked surgeons:
"Oh well that was his liver I just cut open not the stomach... let's reset this"
*awkward silence*
"Wait... Oh shit, well let's just tell his family there were some... unexpected complications right?"
What the Hell?
I can just see it now.
Doctor: My god, the patient's heart is lagging!
Nurse: Doctor! What are you talking about?! He's going into cardiac arrest!
Doctor: Nurse, check the Monster (tm) power cable on the heart rate monitor. I think I got the electron directionality device wrong.
Nurse: He needs to be defibrillated! Hurry!
Doctor: Screw that! I'm not going to pay a micro-transaction fee for such a crappy add-on!
Machine: beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
So now when I feel sick I go to a SL hospital and have a real doc diagnose me.
"That chest pain you describe, is it burning? Yes... And it radiates into your left arm... ok... Say, do you feel dizzy or have a strange taste in your mouth? Hello? ... HELLO? Still there?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Having seen several second life simulators/training sessions, I have to keep asking "Why?"
The benefit is that it is semi-standard and semi-cheap to do, and connects people easily.
But, the effort to create something useful for teaching is great. The benefits are minimal. The controls are frustrating and resemble nothing in real life.
If you really want to teach something well, you're better off creating your own instructional design and simulation. 3-D tools are cheap now.
No substitute for real patients.
However, few real patients are willing to be a guinea pig. It's the great impasse in medical sciences. Since I trained in the third world, I had no shortage of desperate patients in a society where litigation is virtually impossible. So I would consider my years of "hands on" experience much more valuable than someone who has spent the same hours with some form of virtual patient. But then again in "developed" countries, the threat of litigation is very serious. So it's kind of ironic - the country with the greatest punishment for "untrained" doctors produces the least trained doctors...
The example is in England, but the most litigious country is the US. And everyone knows US doctors are TERRIBLE clinicians. Oh they are really good at theory. But take away the expensive diagnostic equipment and lab tests, and they become useless in the field. This in part explains the disproportionally high cost of health care in the US.
When I go to my physician, he asks me questions, and feels and presses around the area I have pains to make a diagnoses. How on earth can a doctor in SL make a good diagnoses when he's not able to touch the patient?
The NHS have found Theme Hospital to be a more accurate simulation.
I'm currently a 4th year medical student and can tell you from personal experience that nothing... absolutely nothing... can replace face-to-face training with real-life patients. SecondLife is a fun playground, but it's not a place to learn to practice the art of medicine or the scientific basis for diagnosing disease. Talking to virtual avatars or playing in a virtual OR is nothing like real life. For instance, in a real-life OR, you must vigorously scrub your hands for 2-3 minutes with special cleanser before you're clean to "gown up." When you're standing around waiting for the procedure to start, you have to have your hands crossed in front of you in a special position to avoid touching anything that isn't sterile, including your own face, sides of your gown, etc. Good luck reproducing these intricate details in Second Life.
Virtually every medical school in the US has a "patient simulator" laboratory where mechanical / robotic dummies are used to train future physicians. These labs also host "simulated patients," - actors, usually from the community, who are trained to play the part of a patient with a specific disease. It isn't cheap for schools to do this, but it's a lot more realistic to perform your first vaginal exam or rectal exam on a real person than in a SecondLife virtual world. Same goes for performing other aspects of the physical exam. How is a student to put their stethescope to the patient's chest, carotid arteries, abdomen, or back in order to arrive at a diagnosis when there is no mechanism to do so in SecondLife? These are things that must be experienced to learn.
If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school, interact with both real and trained patients in real life, and learn the intricacies of the art of talking to a patient, sharing your compassion with them, and working through their problems or concerns under real conditions. When a patient with depression and suicidal ideation shows up to the Emergency Department and there are 13 other patients waiting to be seen, I have to make a decision about how much time I'll spend with them. Do I talk them through their concerns? Do I let Social Work handle it? Do I call for a psychiatry consult? Doing these things in second life are easy and have few repercussions. Calling for a psych consult at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday for simple SI and depression will get my head ripped off by the poor psychiatrist who has to come in to do what I should have been able to do myself.
All this will do is build barriers and put "blinders" onto future physicians. "It couldn't have been a heart attack - he didn't have left sided chest pain radiating to the arm and jaw. He had no shortness of breath! That's how I was taught MI's all present in Second Life!" Med schools need to stop cutting corners and trying to implement these ridiculous ways of trying to be "cutting edge." Want to be cutting edge? Implement a computerized medical record system that actually works - for starters - and institute a system by which patients evaluate their physicians in a publicly available forum so that we can see which docs should be doctors... and which shouldn't. That would do more for patient care than any of this Second Life nonsense.
This is another silly case of using something not because it's well suited, but simply because it is there. A conversation with an avatar? A "Professor" reading a script? How crazy is that? Think about how different that is from a RL consultation where the doctor has to *look at* and *listen to* the patient. Why not act those in RL? The same with making a virtual OR when they could just show them a real one.
Take this quote: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions.' Hey, RL *is* 3D. SL is a poor 2D imitation. A medical dummy *is* 3D. SL is not.
But what's really silly about all this is the PR this is generating for a really dumb idea, when they deserved to be slapped around. All you need to do is find a ridiculous way to work Twitter/YouTube/Facebook into your press release and you'll get widespread coverage.
Check this book by Jerome Groopman called "How Doctors Think". He describes how doctors *should* give consultations. This SL idea is going to teach med students some really bad habits. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8892053
It's interesting that folks are looking into the possibilities. Perhaps it will find itself useful for training and in other different ways.
One idea came to mind:
Health care is a hot topic in the US. I'm old enough to remember family doctors making house calls, in the late 60's and very early 70's, in my home town in upstate NY. Judging by the lack of local medical help in the rural town where I am now, there aren't enough doctors to go around. Some towns have sponsored (new?) doctors, paying their education bill, providing facilities, a place to live, and other basic necessities.
Suppose more communities did this, creating a larger market for doctors. Such virtualization tools could enable doctors to make house calls again, and even give them some side income. Doctors could "see" patients via SL, perhaps for $L, during slow times between RL, local patients.
Develop an inexpensive USB dongle that can measure pulse, BP, temp, etc, and distribute them widely and with a lifetime guarantee. Have it capable of storing medical records for a family.
There will be privacy issues, the storage and sharing of medical records, proxies, filters, and trust, but those are things that will need to be dealt with for any "Health Care Reform" to happen. No more filling out paperwork while in the waiting room, but the internet has a great "magazine rack".
Plus ca change, plus c'est les memes choses.
I find it curious that the reactions to this idea are both so sceptical and so negative. I'm not unbiased in my point of view but I do think I have a bit of objectivity gifted to me from being able to see both sides of the story here. Allow me to explain.
I'm not a nursing student nor am I a nurse, doctor or in fact anyone in the medical profession. I am, however, a third year computing student. Presently myself and my team are creating just one such environment like this, at the University of Tasmania, Australia. We've been working for quite a long time on this project, and we've faced considerable difficulties getting such a project off of the ground, not least because of a mixture of sceptics, confused requirements and because of people who had their heads in the sky thinking we can work wonders with Second Life.
Now I agree with the previous comment titled 'Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down' by CorporalKlinger, but only insofar as that face-to-face and real life training experiences cannot be replaced by Second Life training environments. There is a lot to be said from this comment - and the real experiences are indeed the most valuable of teaching methods for students in this field.
The point that is missed in this comment and many others is that the Second Life training environment is not supposed to be taken as a replacement - what is being created here, in both the instance of my own project, as well as (I assume the majority of) other projects of such a nature is a complement to existing training methods.
Before I continue I want to define what I am talking about when I henceforth use the term 'Simulation': I refer to something attempting to mimic real life in such a way as that it could be practically used in actual real life circumstances. Something taken to be as reality such that training with it would be sufficient to replace training in actuality.
The bottom line with training in Second Life, from my point of view at the very least, is that it is not a simulation and it is not meant to ever replace face-to-face learning. Anyone who claims that it is supposed to be at the simulation level and anyone who claims it will one day replace existing face-to-face methods of training is either entirely delusional or severely misinformed.
Any person who spends any amount of time in Second Life will be able to quickly assess that the environment is not one suitable for simulation level training. The controls are fiddly and odd, the world is not always easy to navigate in, there are other people around, unexpected interruptions, lag preventing any sort of decent real-time training and also any simulation level tool worth its weight should not require learning in its own right first, before the simulation can begin. That's a critical design flaw in its own right that prevents Second Life ever reaching into true simulative areas and this is unlikely to be something that ever changes. Short of the most incredible virtual reality programs, 'true' simulation that will replace real life training is at our present state of technology a practical impossibility.
That ordinary users can identify how problematic Second Life would be as a simulation should already be indicative that developers have taken this into account.
On the flipside, there are a lot of people out there, people who stand to profit or genuinely interested nurses and doctors, who might try and sell the Second Life hospitals and training environments as simulations of reality. These are dangerous waters, because developers willingly working under people who would sell their Second Life environment as a simulation are producing a dangerous tool that could stand to one day misinform people who hold the lives of others in their hands. This is a powerful point against using Second Life and is probably the underlying point in most negative criticism that I've read.
Despite the risks and scepticism involved, the benefits of using Second Life in this way (when the way it is to be used is very clearly defi
A sheathed sword is a sword nonetheless.
+5 for a straw man argument? It's not about replacing face to face training, it's a step before that. I would imagine it adds to what's currently practiced on a faceless dummy, or just reading a textbook, or being lectured at.
If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school
What - like Imperial College, London? You talk as if people are replacing medical schools with schools solely existing in Second Life, which would be absurd.
Slashdot is so predictable. Anything involving certain topics such as Second Life, Wikipedia or Facebook automatically draws criticism, independent of actual facts or evidence. Yes, obviously we should trust a random guy on Slashdot over medical experts in one of the top Universities, perhaps in the world. If the same new story reported a University using a virtual simulator that didn't involve Second Life, I bet you wouldn't have made these comments.
There's no substitute for sitting at someone's bedside, taking their hand, feeling their pulse, and looking at their face for signs of distress.
No, but simulations are good supporting experience, especially if you work on a simulator, and therefore know the routine basics, before doing your live training. You won't get residents that spent their entire internship in simulations, but you'll probably get interns that at least got some basic simulator experience during medical school.
That reminds me of this story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
You mean I actually have to walk in that crowd?