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Video-Gamers Make Better Surgeons
Twenty years passes quickly!Maybe buying my son that Atari, then that Sega Genesis, then a Nintendo, then that PlayStation, followed that XBox weren't such bad ideas after all.
A new report recently published in the Archives of Surgery suggests that physicians perform faster and more accurate laparoscopic surgery if they have played lots of video games.
The authors of the study recruited 33 resident and attending surgeons as voluntary participants.
Participants tracked their video game playing time over a four month period before beginning laparoscopic training which used realistic computer aided simulator. This seems like a reasonable "surrogate experience" since real-world laparoscopic surgeons use fingertip controls and watch the instruments via a color monitor. Think of it like using a joystick to remove a gallbladder.
To nobody's surprise, laparoscopic performance among beginners correlated with past experiences playing video games. Here is a modified excerpt from the published paper:
Past video game play in excess of 3 hours per week correlated with 37% fewer errors and 27% faster completion. Overall procedure score (time and errors) was 33% better for video game players and 42% better if they played more than 3 hours per week. Current video game players made 32% fewer errors, performed 24% faster, and scored 26% better overall (time and errors) than their nonplaying colleagues. When comparing demonstrated video gaming skills, those in the top third made 47% fewer errors, performed 39% faster, and scored 41% better on the overall procedure score. Statistical analysis also indicated that video game skill and past video game experience are significant predictors of demonstrated laparoscopic skills.
Perhaps patients contemplating surgery ought to add a new question to the familiar preoperative discussion: Where did you train? How many of these procedures have you previously performed? What was your highest score on Legend of Zelda?
REFERENCE: Rosser JC, Lynch PJ: The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century. Archives of Surgery 2007; 142:181-186.
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