Med Students Get Training In Second Life Hospitals 126
Hugh Pickens writes "Discover Magazine reports that although medical simulations have been around for a long time, medical schools like Imperial College London are starting to use virtual hospitals in Second Life so students can learn their way around an O.R. before they enter the real thing. The students can also test their knowledge in the Virtual Respiratory Ward by interviewing patient avatars, ordering tests, diagnosing problems, and recommending treatment. 'The real innovation in SL clinical simulations is that they bring people together in a clinical space — you are standing next to an avatar who is a real patient, and the doctor avatar to your right is a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and the nurse to your left is at the University of Pennsylvania hospital,' says John Lester, the Education and Healthcare Market Developer at Linden Labs. The most significant benefit of SL training may be the cost. Real-life training facilities require thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars to build and maintain, while SL simulation rooms can be created for minimal costs, and accessed from anywhere in the world for the price of an internet connection. SL can also expose students to situations that a standard academic program can't duplicate: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions,' says Colleen Lin. 'When you're resuscitating a dummy in real life, it looks like a dummy. But you can program an avatar to look like it's choking or having a heart attack, and it looks more real to the student responsible for resuscitating it.'"
Shockingly sensible (Score:2, Insightful)
Despite being incredibly skeptical of such substitutes for a first life this does seem like a ridiculously good idea for filling such a gap in education given what a leap it must be between classroom knowledge and actually dealing with real world patients.
I must admit that I'm just utterly amazed that someone's actually thought of a way to use second life that isn't utterly futile and useless.
Great for hype, not great for teaching (Score:5, Insightful)
Having seen several second life simulators/training sessions, I have to keep asking "Why?"
The benefit is that it is semi-standard and semi-cheap to do, and connects people easily.
But, the effort to create something useful for teaching is great. The benefits are minimal. The controls are frustrating and resemble nothing in real life.
If you really want to teach something well, you're better off creating your own instructional design and simulation. 3-D tools are cheap now.
There is (Score:2, Insightful)
No substitute for real patients.
However, few real patients are willing to be a guinea pig. It's the great impasse in medical sciences. Since I trained in the third world, I had no shortage of desperate patients in a society where litigation is virtually impossible. So I would consider my years of "hands on" experience much more valuable than someone who has spent the same hours with some form of virtual patient. But then again in "developed" countries, the threat of litigation is very serious. So it's kind of ironic - the country with the greatest punishment for "untrained" doctors produces the least trained doctors...
The example is in England, but the most litigious country is the US. And everyone knows US doctors are TERRIBLE clinicians. Oh they are really good at theory. But take away the expensive diagnostic equipment and lab tests, and they become useless in the field. This in part explains the disproportionally high cost of health care in the US.
Why not just train at a real hospital? (Score:1, Insightful)
Aren't there plenty of hospitals and patients in the world? Isn't that the point of university-hospitals?
Re:Shockingly sensible (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a minute...How does a simulation with real doctors, nurses, and patients in real facilities make it cheaper? The patient has to be in a hospital with all those people around, anyway, right?
Personally, I have never been a fan of simulation. The statement:
You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions
doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If we all tried to be like Dr. House on the same-named television show we'd all have many, many dead patients.
Tactile? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great for hype, not great for teaching (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. I've seen one or two of these things before and it usually seems like it'll turn into more of a social playground than a training environment.
I can understand how this might allow med students to practice diagnosing something, but the OPs point about it being more valuable than resuscitating a dummy in real life seems way off. They will never be able to teach something that requires a specific physical action in a simulated world. For instance, you have to actually practice CPR on something that resembles a human in order to truly understand how to do CPR. You have to actually practice placing the defibrillator paddles on a human form, you can't just right click and select "defibrillate."
Now maybe if we had a Matrix-style brain jack...
Stupid Idea is Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Take this quote: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions.' Hey, RL *is* 3D. SL is a poor 2D imitation. A medical dummy *is* 3D. SL is not.
But what's really silly about all this is the PR this is generating for a really dumb idea, when they deserved to be slapped around. All you need to do is find a ridiculous way to work Twitter/YouTube/Facebook into your press release and you'll get widespread coverage.
Check this book by Jerome Groopman called "How Doctors Think". He describes how doctors *should* give consultations. This SL idea is going to teach med students some really bad habits. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8892053 [npr.org]
Straw Man (Score:2, Insightful)
+5 for a straw man argument? It's not about replacing face to face training, it's a step before that. I would imagine it adds to what's currently practiced on a faceless dummy, or just reading a textbook, or being lectured at.
If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school
What - like Imperial College, London? You talk as if people are replacing medical schools with schools solely existing in Second Life, which would be absurd.
Slashdot is so predictable. Anything involving certain topics such as Second Life, Wikipedia or Facebook automatically draws criticism, independent of actual facts or evidence. Yes, obviously we should trust a random guy on Slashdot over medical experts in one of the top Universities [timesonline.co.uk], perhaps in the world [topmba.com]. If the same new story reported a University using a virtual simulator that didn't involve Second Life, I bet you wouldn't have made these comments.
Re:Great for hype, not great for teaching (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created. The ability to bankrupt a country is nothing compared to force of a thousand poorly written systems, implemented by representatives of Satan all integrated by the lowest bidder.
The majority of doctors today would like to work with an electronic medical record that didn't suck donkey balls, take more time than evolution and cost more than a Larry Ellison's yacht. I'm not sure just exactly who's fault it is that most EMRs are just this side of awful, but since it's Sunday morning, I'll blame Dick Cheney.
Re:Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down (Score:3, Insightful)
Amazing. Did you even read the summary, to say nothing of the article? No one, no one, is talking about replacing hands-on training with Second Life. It's a preparation. A supplement. A place to play with scenarios that you can't easily replicate with actors, and to give colleagues from widely separated geographical locations a way to work together at least to some degree.
Me, I'm a veteran military medic and civilian EMT with ten years of experience in emergency medicine, so I hope, almost-doctor, that you'll take a little advice from an old soldier. The more you train, the better you will do when you face the real thing. Now, it is entirely true that no training of any kind will ever replace the real thing. Doing CPR on a dummy isn't like doing it on a real person at three in the morning in a rainy alley. Reading a cardiac monitor trace in a classroom isn't the same as doing it under pressure in an ER with people screaming at you. Putting an IV needle in your classmates is a hell of a lot easier than hunting for a vein in someone who's nearly bled out, where you only get one shot and if you don't get the patient's fluid volume up in five minutes he'll die. But you have to practice these skills, over and over again, to the point where your hands and eyes know what to do even when your brain forgets.
If you haven't learned this lesson yet, believe me, in residency you will.
And personally, I would have loved to have this kind of simulation around when I was training. It would have been very helpful in helping people get their heads around the intricacies of emergency medicine operations. Not so much the actual hands-on procedures (although there's some interesting simulation work going on in that area too) but navigating the controlled chaos of an emergency scene or busy ER. Would it have been a substitute for live training, or for the experience of the real thing? Of course not. But it would have been a fine place to start. The more training you do, and the more different kinds of training you do, the better you will handle it when someone's life is literally in your hands.
Re:Shockingly sensible (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I have never been a fan of simulation.
You've obviously never been in the military or been trained to deal with stressful, life or death situations. Or at least I hope you haven't. If you have, you need to change professions immediately. Simulations are absolutely critical to such training and the more realistic the better. Simulations can recreate and/or demonstrate the confusion and chaos that reigns in situations like that and helps tremendously in dealing with it when those situations occur for real. Actually simulations and role playing is very helpful in even mundane situations like important business meetings.
Re:There is (Score:3, Insightful)
You live in the US but you don't understand what a figure of speech is?
Re:Cold comfort (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no substitute for sitting at someone's bedside, taking their hand, feeling their pulse, and looking at their face for signs of distress.
No, but simulations are good supporting experience, especially if you work on a simulator, and therefore know the routine basics, before doing your live training. You won't get residents that spent their entire internship in simulations, but you'll probably get interns that at least got some basic simulator experience during medical school.