Video Games Help Sharpen Surgery Skills

A surgeon claims that playing video games helps his surgery skills.

22:13 04 November 2018

Trainee surgeon Saied Froghi says that playing video games, such as Halo and Age of Empires in his spare time during medical school, helped sharpen his surgery skills.

 

He is one of the doctors and healthcare professionals who disagree with a professor of surgery who claims that medical students are losing manual dexterity because they are spending too much time “swiping.”

 

"If you take the example of keyhole surgery, your eyes focus on a screen and your hands move synchronously with what you are doing," Dr Froghi said.

 

"That's a similar scenario to when you are playing football with a games console. Your hands know where the buttons are and how to rotate the instrument."

 

Rajin Chowdhury, a registrar in anaesthetic and intensive care at Sheffield Teaching Hospital, agrees saying that playing video games has improved his hand-eye coordination.

 

"For example in an appendicectomy, because of the way the camera is inserted in the abdomen, when you move it down [in the body] you move it up on the image. When I want to move right you have to move it left.