Perhaps there is some use to your son, friend, or partners unique addiction to playing console games after all that may benefit other people medically in the future.
A study published online via AFP has revealed that gaming high school and college students have better hand-eye coordination and control than medical residents when it comes to surgical simulations. It seems that button pushing and combinations done by gamers have some purpose besides ruining the couch at home.
Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in the US discovered that both high school sophomores who played video games for an average of two hours a day and college students (who played for four hours a day) were equal to and often outperformed residents in terms of precise hand-eye coordination, the amount of tension applied to instruments, and the steadiness of their grasping skills when performing surgical tasks such as suturing, passing a needle or lifting surgical instruments via robotic arms.
The small study of 29 subjects, which tested competency in more than 20 different skill parameters and 32 different teaching steps on a robotic surgery simulator found that the nine high school students (average age 16), came out on top, followed by nine college students from Texas A&M University, leaving the 11 UTMB residents who had an average age of 31 in third place.
The inspiration for this study was first developed when one doctor saw his son, an avid video game player, take the reins of a robotic surgery simulator at a medical convention who happens to be also the lead author of the study and associate professor and director of minimally invasive gynecology in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UTMB. Despite no formal training, the gamer was immediately at ease with the technology and the type of movements required to operate the robot.
However, when the subjects were tasked with performing a complex simulated laparoscopic surgery without robot assistance, the resident physicians, as expected, outperformed the competition by some distance. Well expectations are limited to hand-eye coordination, leave the actual surgery to the experts right?
Most physicians in practice today never learned robotic surgery in medical school. However, students with enhanced visual-spatial experience and hand-eye coordination that are a result of the technologically savvy world they are immersed in, schools should rethink how best to teach this generation.
Source: Yahoo! & AFP