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But I play one on Tv (Score:5, Funny)
I am not a doctor but I have trained as on in Second Life.
Re:But I play one on Tv (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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I tipped my server, but then the HD started making noises and a cable came loose.
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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.
Emergency room cases... (Score:5, Funny)
This should come in handy for doctors trained this way when a blue, eight-foot tall hermaphroditic troll shows up at a hospital emergency room complaining of chest pains.
Re:Emergency room cases... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes.
And when a mad scientist finally creates furries in real life, the doctors will already be familiar with the anatomy.
Parent
Comedy. Gold. (Score:2)
You win the Internets!
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.
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.
Parent
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To get the dummies to physically appear to react to the medical conditions that they are simulating requires special effects technology. To simulate the physical behavior in a virtual world just requires some software programming.
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Very realistic dummies (ie other med students) are very easy to come by in the real world.
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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
That reminds me of this story... (Score:3, Interesting)
That reminds me of this story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 [wikipedia.org]
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It's next-best thing to having the virtual reality simulators or actors playing patients.
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It's next-best thing to having the virtual reality simulators or actors playing patients.
Exactly. So since you still have to have real people behind the avatars responding why on earth settle for the "next best thing" and actually go for the best thing? Its better for training, easier for the actors to participate in. True it does not involve computers so it isn't as "cool" as SL but I can see no pedagogical benefits from using SL.
I don't think so. (Score:2)
The avatars look nothing like real humans. This would be more like a "choose your own adventure" game.
Do you have a cough? ... ?
Yes.
Is it dry, whooping, etc, etc, etc
I had pneumonia two years ago. When I went to the doctor he had one of their interns come in so she could listen to what early pneumonia sounded like in different parts of the chest and whether I was inhaling or exhaling.
This sounds more like trying to train marksmanship with Halo. The game interface is completely different from what you'll enc
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Where is the Reset Button? (Score:3, Funny)
The inevitable dialogue between totally overworked surgeons:
"Oh well that was his liver I just cut open not the stomach... let's reset this"
*awkward silence*
"Wait... Oh shit, well let's just tell his family there were some... unexpected complications right?"
I can just see what will happen (Score:3, Funny)
I can just see it now.
Doctor: My god, the patient's heart is lagging!
Nurse: Doctor! What are you talking about?! He's going into cardiac arrest!
Doctor: Nurse, check the Monster (tm) power cable on the heart rate monitor. I think I got the electron directionality device wrong.
Nurse: He needs to be defibrillated! Hurry!
Doctor: Screw that! I'm not going to pay a micro-transaction fee for such a crappy add-on!
Machine: beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
Great! (Score:3, Funny)
So now when I feel sick I go to a SL hospital and have a real doc diagnose me.
"That chest pain you describe, is it burning? Yes... And it radiates into your left arm... ok... Say, do you feel dizzy or have a strange taste in your mouth? Hello? ... HELLO? Still there?"
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.
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Because Linden has one hell of a PR machine, basically. Throw futuristic buzzwords in, sprinkle liberally with perverts and furries and flying dongs.. you're left with a lot of people writing for a lot of business and trade mags about how next-gen SL is, how that sort of interaction is the future of (insert legit subject here), and vigorously defending those viewpoints so nobody suspects they actually are perverts or furries or flying dongs. We all know they actually are, though.
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I don't think you've actually been in SL recently, or at all.
I mean, "flying dongs", come on. That was pretty much of a one time trolling event, and not nothing normal, but roughly equivalent to people posting ASCII art of goatse on slashdot. I've only actually seen it on youtube and never seen it in person, despite logging in almost every day for 3 years.
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Like I said, I've been in SL for about 3 years, logging in mostly every day. I mostly hang out in Luskwood.
We've got a large staff of moderators (of which I'm one) that ensure we don't have "flying dongs" (never seen one actually), or "6-foot fox-like creatures with strap-ons" (actually I am a 6 foot fox-like creature, but it's a PG area, so we don't allow strap-ons or anything of the sort).
I've not found it necessary to pay for my own sim. Decent places in SL can be found if you look around a bit. It's jus
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Mkay, so you fall under the furry-trumpeting-the-praises-of-SL category, then. You wouldn't happen to be the guy with the fox-headed avatar I've seen pictures of in business mags?
The only reason I rant against SL is because it's constantly paraded around as something it's not.
It's a social sandbox. Period end of story. There's nothing WRONG with a social sandbox, but after years now of buzz-heavy articles about how it's so next-gen and how it is the future of online interaction and businesses would be fo
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Doubtful, unless the fox was blue and wearing a Debian shirt, or futuristic glowing armor.
I'm mostly involved in scripting and modding the SL viewer. I doubt business mags would find me interesting as I don't do anything business related.
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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 tha
Re:Great for hype, not great for teaching (Score:5, Interesting)
You are thinking like an organic mechanic. Very few doctors do a large amount of resuscitating and defibrillating patients. They need practice in interviewing skills to get diagnoses, which SL can give them. Getting a good patient history, and correctly interpreting it, means the difference between successfully treating the patient and not.
They need practice ordering lab tests and interpreting the results, ordering the right test, not pissing off the lab techs, not expecting TV medi-drama speed on the tests.
The hospitals can run the SL experience with ZERO investment into 3D equipment, and without taking up RL space in the hospital. I've participated in RL tyraining for interns and med students, and getting everyone into the same place at the same time is difficult. With SL, the "patient" can be in Cleveland and the med student in Detroit.
Parent
Interesting step in future health care (Score:2, Informative)
It's interesting that folks are looking into the possibilities. Perhaps it will find itself useful for training and in other different ways.
One idea came to mind:
Health care is a hot topic in the US. I'm old enough to remember family doctors making house calls, in the late 60's and very early 70's, in my home town in upstate NY. Judging by the lack of local medical help in the rural town where I am now, there aren't enough doctors to go around. Some towns have sponsored (new?) doctors, paying their educ
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Yep - while Slashdot, supposedly the home of the forward looking geek and nerd, spend their time (once again) pointing and laughing.
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However, I am really excited that doctors of the future will have greater computer literacy.
The majority of doctors today work on paper and refuse to have anything to do with computers.
This is a huge drag on our medical system, and reminds me of stories where NASA scientists refused to use computers because they liked doing calculations by hand.
It wasn't until their hands were forced or the old guard retired that they could see the opportunities computers opened up.
The medical record of the future will not
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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 E
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well MS could do it a few ways
1 port SL to the Xbox platform and just use the SL grid
2 pay SL for a copy of their software and put up a grid of their own
3 just say FIDO and hand Linden Labs the protohype hardware and the needed SDK
but then Microsoft does not want to get that "OpenSource" stuff on them
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
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I guess not all of us are as fortunate as you to have the flexibility of disposable, forgettable patients and still yet call the outcome of such experience enlightening.
But take away the expensive diagnostic equipment and lab tests, and they become useless in the field.
You're right. We should skip the MR and go right to exploratory surgery.
Oh, one other thing. In my wife's oncology practice, there are many people willing to have a run of trial therapy. You may call them a guinea pig, but here in the US w
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You live in the US but you don't understand what a figure of speech is?
Of course... (Score:2)
Tactile? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Tactile? (Score:4, Informative)
RTFA, or at least the submission.
Nobody is talking about diagnosing patients on SL. They're talking about using for training, of the sort that's currently being performed on dummies. The supposed advantage is that in SL you can make a dummy that reacts to things being done to it much cheaper than a real one, which would need to have some fancy robotics installed into it.
I don't know if this is actually helpful or not, but it's got nothing to do with diagnosing people through SL.
Parent
Over in the UK (Score:2, Funny)
Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtually every medical school in the US has a "patient simulator" laboratory where mechanical / robotic dummies are used to train future physicians. These labs also host "simulated patients," - actors, usually from the community, who are trained to play the part of a patient with a specific disease. It isn't cheap for schools to do this, but it's a lot more realistic to perform your first vaginal exam or rectal exam on a real person than in a SecondLife virtual world. Same goes for performing other aspects of the physical exam. How is a student to put their stethescope to the patient's chest, carotid arteries, abdomen, or back in order to arrive at a diagnosis when there is no mechanism to do so in SecondLife? These are things that must be experienced to learn.
If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school, interact with both real and trained patients in real life, and learn the intricacies of the art of talking to a patient, sharing your compassion with them, and working through their problems or concerns under real conditions. When a patient with depression and suicidal ideation shows up to the Emergency Department and there are 13 other patients waiting to be seen, I have to make a decision about how much time I'll spend with them. Do I talk them through their concerns? Do I let Social Work handle it? Do I call for a psychiatry consult? Doing these things in second life are easy and have few repercussions. Calling for a psych consult at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday for simple SI and depression will get my head ripped off by the poor psychiatrist who has to come in to do what I should have been able to do myself.
All this will do is build barriers and put "blinders" onto future physicians. "It couldn't have been a heart attack - he didn't have left sided chest pain radiating to the arm and jaw. He had no shortness of breath! That's how I was taught MI's all present in Second Life!" Med schools need to stop cutting corners and trying to implement these ridiculous ways of trying to be "cutting edge." Want to be cutting edge? Implement a computerized medical record system that actually works - for starters - and institute a system by which patients evaluate their physicians in a publicly available forum so that we can see which docs should be doctors... and which shouldn't. That would do more for patient care than any of this Second Life nonsense.
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 su
Okay lets try this (Score:2)
"OR, you must vigorously scrub your hands for 2-3 minutes with special cleanser before you're clean to "gown up."**1 When you're standing around waiting for the procedure to start, you have to have your hands crossed in front of you in a special position to avoid touching anything that isn't sterile, including your own face, sides of your gown, etc.**2 Good luck reproducing these intricate details in Second Life."
1 sink with a "scrub hands" animation rigged to a clock script
2 Animation override with "zero c
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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
Re:Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to learn to be a doctor - go to a real medical school, interact with both real and trained patients in real life, and learn the intricacies of the art of talking to a patient, sharing your compassion with them, and working through their problems or concerns under real conditions. When a patient with depression and suicidal ideation shows up to the Emergency Department and there are 13 other patients waiting to be seen, I have to make a decision about how much time I'll spend with them. Do I talk them through their concerns? Do I let Social Work handle it? Do I call for a psychiatry consult? Doing these things in second life are easy and have few repercussions. Calling for a psych consult at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday for simple SI and depression will get my head ripped off by the poor psychiatrist who has to come in to do what I should have been able to do myself.
Your reasoning supports the premise rather than opposing it. This type of simulation allows you to encounter 1000's of such situations cheaply and quickly under conditions where no one is going to die when you screw the pooch completely. It allows for you and others to go back and much more objectively evaluate your performance without the emotion of knowing that your wrong actions just killed someone. It allows you to store in your brain a much greater range of scenarios and situations. No one is saying eliminate face-to-face training with real-life patients. Simulation allows you to be better prepared and to augment such training. It allows for much greater scope of training since face-to-face training with real-life patients is both much more expensive and much more risky. Would it be better for you to perform open heart surgery the first time on a simulator or actually slicing up a (hopefully) live patients heart? Wouldn't it be much better on a simulator where you can encounter a broad range of complications and critical situations where the patients life isn't at risk?
Parent
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]
Training for future doctors and vets. (Score:2)
Two Sides to the Coin (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it curious that the reactions to this idea are both so sceptical and so negative. I'm not unbiased in my point of view but I do think I have a bit of objectivity gifted to me from being able to see both sides of the story here. Allow me to explain.
I'm not a nursing student nor am I a nurse, doctor or in fact anyone in the medical profession. I am, however, a third year computing student. Presently myself and my team are creating just one such environment like this, at the University of Tasmania, Australia. We've been working for quite a long time on this project, and we've faced considerable difficulties getting such a project off of the ground, not least because of a mixture of sceptics, confused requirements and because of people who had their heads in the sky thinking we can work wonders with Second Life.
Now I agree with the previous comment titled 'Creates barriers, doesn't knock them down' by CorporalKlinger, but only insofar as that face-to-face and real life training experiences cannot be replaced by Second Life training environments. There is a lot to be said from this comment - and the real experiences are indeed the most valuable of teaching methods for students in this field.
The point that is missed in this comment and many others is that the Second Life training environment is not supposed to be taken as a replacement - what is being created here, in both the instance of my own project, as well as (I assume the majority of) other projects of such a nature is a complement to existing training methods.
Before I continue I want to define what I am talking about when I henceforth use the term 'Simulation': I refer to something attempting to mimic real life in such a way as that it could be practically used in actual real life circumstances. Something taken to be as reality such that training with it would be sufficient to replace training in actuality.
The bottom line with training in Second Life, from my point of view at the very least, is that it is not a simulation and it is not meant to ever replace face-to-face learning. Anyone who claims that it is supposed to be at the simulation level and anyone who claims it will one day replace existing face-to-face methods of training is either entirely delusional or severely misinformed.
Any person who spends any amount of time in Second Life will be able to quickly assess that the environment is not one suitable for simulation level training. The controls are fiddly and odd, the world is not always easy to navigate in, there are other people around, unexpected interruptions, lag preventing any sort of decent real-time training and also any simulation level tool worth its weight should not require learning in its own right first, before the simulation can begin. That's a critical design flaw in its own right that prevents Second Life ever reaching into true simulative areas and this is unlikely to be something that ever changes. Short of the most incredible virtual reality programs, 'true' simulation that will replace real life training is at our present state of technology a practical impossibility.
That ordinary users can identify how problematic Second Life would be as a simulation should already be indicative that developers have taken this into account.
On the flipside, there are a lot of people out there, people who stand to profit or genuinely interested nurses and doctors, who might try and sell the Second Life hospitals and training environments as simulations of reality. These are dangerous waters, because developers willingly working under people who would sell their Second Life environment as a simulation are producing a dangerous tool that could stand to one day misinform people who hold the lives of others in their hands. This is a powerful point against using Second Life and is probably the underlying point in most negative criticism that I've read.
Despite the risks and scepticism involved, the benefits of using Second Life in this way (when the way it is to be used is very clearly defi