Magic the Gathering for Med Students | Hacker News Reader

Magic the Gathering for Med Students

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41 pointsCoryOndrejka10 comments

This is awesome. Why limit it to infectious disease? Acute non-infectious disease (trauma, vascular events, cancer) would be a great next step, followed perhaps by common disease. This would be a tremendous way to learn pharm. At the end of the day, rote knowledge can lay down a nice structure for actual understanding. (I know this sounds backwards, but if you know the right answer then it makes it easier to remember the mechanism by which it is correct.)

I think games would be a great way to learn a lot of things. If I ever get time I want to make a "pathogen" video game - you would have to identify the pathogen and attack it with the right antibiotic or immune system component.

Games can be a good way to learn a lot of things, and so can simulation for the more complex situations. There is a push for using sim and serious games in medical education these days (went to a great conference a few months ago about it - IMSH 2010). It's funny you mentioned the "pathogen" video game - I made one a couple of years ago in residency called Bacteria Tower Defense (flash game). And it's designed so it can be easily updated by changing the data "file" to reflect changes in antimicrobial therapy. I'm actually working with several academic centers now on integrating that and my current project, SimCode ACLS, a web-delivered real-time simulator to improve the quality of teaching healthcare providers how to resuscitate people, while decreasing the cost of training and competency tracking. Will be presenting it at a national medical conference (SGIM) this week.

Yeah, Bacteria Tower Defense is along the lines of what I was thinking of. Simulations are good too, but video games can combine screwing around with actually learning something.

If you did it during a residency I guess I have no excuse.

This is right up my alley. I'll be going to med school in a few months, and so I'm looking for study materials and methods (I plan on trying Anki). I think it's great that they're trying to make the study of medicine a bit more enjoyable than just rote memorization. Also, as someone who hopes to venture into entrepreneurship as a physician, it's really encouraging to read about such ventures.

Do it! Anki is amazing. Unfortunately, I have yet to manage to convince anyone else to use it... I can see how it can look intimidating. It's a big commitment to have to do expired flash cards every day! OTOH, things you put into Anki you can remember for the rest of your life! I wish I had it when I was in school. There's so much I've already forgotten...

Can you imagine if doctors remembered everything they ever had to memorize in med school?

> Can you imagine if doctors remembered everything they ever had to memorize in med school?

It'd be pretty amazing! Which is why it's unfortunate that we don't have a close approximation to that with a man/machine interaction, where people do the hard-to-automate bits, and machines do the rote memorization bits. The first diagnosis expert system to beat human doctors (in an admittedly narrow domain), MYCIN, is now something like 35 years old, and yet doctors still rarely use computational assistance. Or at least, they don't officially: I know plenty of doctors who use Wikipedia in their daily work.

There was a bit of a huff over it today, one of the main pieces of art they are using is heavily based on a piece from Magic the Gathering. http://www.mananation.com/art-plagiarism-healing-blade-game/

The only trouble I see with this is that it needs to stay up to date with current medical knowledge (which changes all the time). The game will quickly go out of date if it is not kept strictly aligned with current medical texts.

If I recall correctly, there was some anecdotal evidence that time committed to video game actually improves a surgeon's capabilities during an operation. If a card game can do the same for pharmacology, cheers to Nerdcore!

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