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Comment by rdlecler1 | Hacker News Reader

I read an article somewhere that manual dexterity was one of the most important factors in a successful surgery (more than education). Seems like something we should be screening and should be something that favors gamers?

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A friend of mine took up being an orthopedic surgical PA late in life after being a mechanic for a couple decades. From what he says, there's a lot more brute strength and ignorance involved than one might envision, and the skills of handling power tools transferred surprisingly well.

My fondest orthopedic memory as a naive third year medical student was walking by the operating suite and seeing the resident and the attending on a total knee replacement suit up in full body suits with ventilation. "Oh," I thought in wonderment, "what commitment to a sterile environment!"

Then a couple months later I was the student on service suiting up and I understood the truth: they're aerosolizing bone dust with those shrieking saws when they're implanting the new joint. The room was actually foggy with the stuff. The suits were to protect us!

It's a gritty specialty.

> Seems like something we should be screening and should be something that favors gamers?

Ehhh, not so sure about that. I was really good at FPS games (played counter strike for some 10 years), and I can't stitch for the life of me. My mother who is in her late 60s however, oh boy can she stitch and stitch fast. She can thread things well too - Last thanksgiving, we were doing some threading with the turkey, and I was amazed at her threading skills. I tried to imitate her but just couldn't.

> should be something that favors gamers

Not sure. Don't game use only 2 of 5 fingers on each hand excessively ? ( Thumb and Index)

To play devil's advocate: how many/which fingers do you use to hold a needle? I'd guess it's roughly the same ;)

You hold a needle with fingers, but you also need to handle it up, down, left, right and rotate it pitch, roll, yaw. Lot more analog than pressing fixed buttons.

Well if there's a game controller that works on surgery motions may be a lot more parents would encourage their kids to play this game.

> how many/which fingers do you use to hold a needle ?

Suturing is not the only thing a Surgeon does...

For controllers, yeah, more or less.

But given the way games also tend to be addicting, I wonder if it hurts people's drive/motivation (on aggregate, not per individual) as much as it helps people's finger dexterity.

I often wonder if certain sports actually do a better job training dexterity, short of focused practice on specific tasks. Or knitting, or juggling, or... heck, even cooking.

Building on what another poster said, gamers who play on computer utilize pretty much all of the fingers on their keyboard hand (likely left hand for most people, non-dominant for most). The mouse hand is usually just index, middle, and thumb.

Well, do you practice stitching? If not, then how would you possibly be good at it?

Yeah, I don't.

To think of it now: I think boy scouts really are a great organization, to be teaching kids how to tie knots and survive in the outdoors.

I wish such a thing existed for me to attend as an adult!

In Germany it would be "Technisches Hilfswerk" (technical disaster assistance). I am sure something similar exists in the US or elsewhere.

10 years ago or more, I read an article saying that telepresence surgery was the wave of the future and doctors who grew up playing video games were much better at it.

But you'd expect that to be increasing on average, given how video games keep getting more popular. It seems like, perhaps, operating buttons and joysticks doesn't train the same sort of dexterity as sewing does.

I was just looking it up -- here's the original paper, from 2007:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17309970

And, if you don't want to read the paper, here's a piece about it and some related studies (2013):

https://www.medicalbag.com/lifestyle/gamers-make-good-surgeo...

Only tangentially related, but still relevant: I had a very positive experience with a telepresence neurologist this year - not in surgery, but in consultation.

My mom had what we thought might be a stroke, but without the typical symptoms of a stroke. We wound up in the ER on a Saturday in a medium-sized metropolitan area (maybe 250k people). They wheeled her back for a head CT, and at the same time wheeled in a telepresence cart, with a computer screen and a video camera. Within a minute or so, a remote neurologist was on the screen talking to me. Before my mom was even wheeled back to the exam room, he had viewed the images and identified the bleed in her brain that was causing her vision problems.

I was fascinated by all of this, so I asked the ER doctor and nurse about it, and they told me that with specialties like neurology, on a weekend they’d have to page someone to come in. It would likely be 30 minutes before they even walked in the door of the hospital. With the telepresence neurologist, the SLA was something like 5 minutes. That’s a huge difference when dealing with serious medical problems, and it’s not hyperbole to say that it will save lives.

Another thing I learned that day: Not all strokes look like strokes, and any sudden-onset vision problem is a stroke until it’s been ruled out.

I wonder how much of the telepresence thing has to deal with adjusting for lag. Accounting for lag and high pings was definitely something a lot of early gamers grew up with (and is still an issue).

i think it favors musicians more than gamers. gamers operate digitally in many cases, with buttons that are on or off. not true of the thumbsticks ill conceded. but musicians often execute much more nuanced movements as far as pressure and placement are concerned. i am biased as a guitarist.

I'm a gamer and I really liked surgery. I've always been kind of clumsy so I put in a lot of time practicing in the labs before I started doing simple operations. My surgery rotation was a great experience because of that.

The problem with these rotations is you do them and then move on to the other ones. More than one year passed before I got the chance to stitch something up again. The results were not as good...

I believe that if you want to be a surgeon you need to be constantly practicing and honing your manual skills. It's probably much easier to do this in residency where you're 100% focused on surgery and won't have to switch to a pediatrics or gynecology rotation after some time.

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