The next time you're having your liver removed, your rectum repaired or your cerebrum stitched, you might want to find out just how avid a gamer your surgeon is. That's right, surgeons with mad gaming skills actually perform better surgery than non-gaming surgeons. How's that for video games being a necessity for saving a life?
Science Daily [via Uber-Facts] reports on the results from the latest study involving medical science and digital interactive entertainment. According to the new study headed up by James C. Rosser Jr., M.D., of Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, he asked 21 residents and 12 attending physicians about their gaming habits. Why? Because they were put through some rigorous testing that put their surgeon skills on the perusal block.
So what did the study find? Well, the day-and-a-half crash course consisted of Rosser Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills and Suturing Program testing, which was used to assess the gamers versus the non-gamers when it came to their surgery techniques.
In simple terms, the 33 surgeons were in a competition to see who had the better skills, and funnily enough the 15 surgeons who had never played video games did not fare as well as the surgeons who did. According to the article in the February issue of the Archives of Surgery, the author states that...
"Surgeons who had played video games in the past for more than three hours per week made 37 percent fewer errors [in the Top Gun course], were 27 percent faster and scored 42 percent better overall than surgeons who never played video games. Current video game players made 32 percent fewer errors, were 24 percent faster and scored 26 percent better overall than their non-player colleagues,"
So what does this mean? It means that if you find half your lower body separated from your upper body and somebody has to work like a horse to try to put you back together before all that gooey stuff between your skin walls dry out and you die, you'd better hope the surgeon you get can land some mean head shots in Halo and has the twitch skills to lead a team to victory in Call of Duty, otherwise you might find both your upper and lower halves sharing a slab in the morgue.
One thing worth noting is that this kind of flies in the face of other recent studies that painted a slightly more grim and detrimental outlook on gaming, especially for males, when it was revealed that boys turn out a lot less sophisticated than girls if they play too many video games at a young age. Well, even if they lose a bit of sophistication in the process, you at least have to tip your hat off to the gaming guru surgeons, and marvel at their ability to dice you up with fewer errors than their non-gaming counterparts.
In the end, if you get to ask for a surgeon for a vital operation, be sure to ask for the one who doesn't mind bringing a Lancer or hidden blade to work. He just might save your life.
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