The next time your parent or spouse suggests you need to lay off the video games, simply reply: I’m not wasting time, I’m practicing to become a surgeon.
In a study published yesterday in PLoS One, scientists found that playing the Wii improved laparoscopic surgery performance metrics. See figure below:
Here is an excerpt from the paper that summarizes the methodology and findings:
We performed a prospective randomized study on 42 post-graduate I–II year residents in General, Vascular and Endoscopic Surgery. All participants were tested on a validated laparoscopic simulator and then randomized to group 1 (Controls, no training with the Nintendo® Wii™), and group 2 (training with the Nintendo® Wii™) with 21 subjects in each group, according to a computer-generated list. After four weeks, all residents underwent a testing session on the laparoscopic simulator of the same tasks as in the first session. All 42 subjects in both groups improved significantly from session 1 to session 2. Compared to controls, the Wii group showed a significant improvement in performance (p<0.05) for 13 of the 16 considered performance metrics.
Perhaps medical schools should consider recruiting from the Wii leaderboards. 