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Surgery students spend so much time swiping on flat, two-dimensional screens that they are losing the ability to perform simple tasks necessary to conduct life-saving operations, such as stitching and sewing up patients. As a result, students have become less competent and confident in using their hands—leading to very high exam grades despite a lack of tactile knowledge.
Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, argues that two-dimensional flat screen activity is substituting for the direct experience of handling materials and developing physical skills. Such skills might once have been gained at school or at home, by cutting textiles, measuring ingredients, repairing something that’s broken, learning woodwork, or holding an instrument.
Kneebone now notices that medical students and trainee surgeons are not comfortable cutting or tying string because they don’t have practical experience developing and using these skills. He also mentioned that colleagues in various branches of medicine have made the same observation.
See also this BBC news item: Surgery Students ‘Losing Dexterity to Stitch Patients’.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 27 2019, @04:37PM (10 children)
The thing is: medical school starts in people's 20s, you really want to start building those fine motor skills as soon as possible, like ages 5 through 12.
Billy, why are you knitting at recess? My mom wants me to become a surgeon.
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(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday March 27 2019, @06:24PM (3 children)
Start them with Lego and Erector sets.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 27 2019, @07:25PM (2 children)
Also valid... but I haven't seen a kid playing with an erector set in the last 15 years, I think that nuts and bolts have lost their appeal - maybe if they assembled into Marvel characters?
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Wednesday March 27 2019, @10:04PM (1 child)
Nuts and bolts are really over-specced for putting together toys. The manual labor required to assemble them is mostly wasted, compared with modern snap-together plastic, like Lego and K'nex. Even Ikea has reduced the amount of tightening motion required with the cam connectors.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday March 28 2019, @04:18AM
I so wanted meccano sets when I was a kid, but no way could we afford them. That's probably why I'm not a surgeon now.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Thursday March 28 2019, @12:04AM (5 children)
My cousin is a Biology PhD that taught some pre-med biology classes early in his career. He said the amount of idiots in pre-med made him terrified of the entire medical industry.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 28 2019, @01:51AM (4 children)
The thing that scares me more than the idiots is the AMA's continued deification of them through the insufficient residency program filter. They have made M.D.s an overly scarce commodity and that's giving the ones that get through unreasonable amounts of power and responsibility, and far too many of them get God complexes as a result.
There are idiots everywhere, including graduates of the best residency programs - I'd rather move from 5% idiot M.D.s to 10% idiot M.D.s with twice as many M.D.s total available, the benefits of second opinions would quash the net unchecked idiot rate to 1%, a 5x reduction in idiot damage.
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(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 29 2019, @08:07PM (3 children)
I'll just leave this here [vox.com]. Atul Gawande was picked to head up the Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway/JP Morgan health initiative.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 29 2019, @09:06PM (2 children)
1000 years ago, if you had access, you could learn pretty much all there is to know about medicine in a given place from the current practitioners - and if you apprenticed with them for a year or two and they're in a teaching mood, you'll pretty much know all that they do by the end of that. To be a really good physician, you might travel to three or four of the best teachers in diverse locations and apprentice / teach with each of them.
Of course the internet obviates the need for travel for 95% of learning, hands on is still a valuable thing, and should not be neglected, but - the academic side of things is covered pretty well online. But... even in a specialty like oncology focused on the lungs, there's probably 1000 hours of reading per year just to keep up with developments pertinent to the specialty, and that would be 1000 hours per year not treating patients or doing research to further the field. I say: go for it! Hyper-focus specialists, have go-to experts for the narrowest of fields and make them available to call on for cases that need it. Give them time - no DEMAND they take the time to keep current in their field and have them rate their peers regularly on currency and competency. But, you know what we need to make this a practical reality? More M.D.s.
Increase the numerical supply of M.D.s 3x, increase the continuing education requirements for specialists so they spend half their time on CE and research - but the numerical increase in total M.D.s means they will be more available overall. Oh, and do something to shorten or otherwise make more available the residency programs - not every M.D. needs to be a hyper-educated ultra-knowlegable $800K/yr specialist, I think that there should be enough family practice M.D.s out there that they drive down demand until their compensation is closer to $80K per year. If they want to make more, specialize - get a skill like surgery, etc. but there's no reason to choke off the supply of simple generalist M.D.s with the level of knowledge that was common back 50 years ago.
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(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 29 2019, @09:20PM (1 child)
So humans have gone from learning everything in a few years, to requiring a half a business year of reading every year to keep up with an individual specialty, without evolving our brains to accommodate the additional learning? This doesn't sound scalable using current learning/application methods unless some specialties start falling by the wayside.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:26AM
Yep, pretty much. 1000 years ago, the average medical practitioner didn't really do all that much - a few good tricks with herbs, a few pointless things like leeches, and whatever their bedside manner happened to be - they probably were as much placebo as hard-therapeutic, and that's not a bad thing.
Today's average family practitioner can probably get by with little more, but what they do need to be able to recognize is when somebody has something serious that requires specialist care - and refer them for that care. With 7B people on the planet and counting, we can have thousands of medical specialties - and we are rapidly heading in that direction. Unless you count the robot revolution as evolution, our brains aren't going to expand to be able to keep up with everything that everybody is learning about a field as broad as oncology, it needs to break up - have some generalists who can diagnose what kind of cancer you have and which specialties are the most likely to help you, then refer. What I know of oncology right now is that the people you see have a favorite hammer they like to use, and if your cancer looks like a nail to them, they go for it - even when there are at least a half dozen varieties of therapy that might apply: gamma knife, proton, thermal ablation, radioactive seeds, MRI guided or not, and the good old fashioned sharp stick - each has its place, but if you go to see a doctor at the proton center, they're likely going to try protons on you even when something else might have better results for your particular Dx (yes, they're trained to be better than this, but they will often Dx something that protons are most appropriate for when it's a difficult call, because protons is what they do, and they often aren't more than vaguely aware of all the options.)
So, it's not about every doctor being a God knowing everything about everything, it's about them working together as a (more) functional society and knowing when to refer a case to the right doctor for the best outcome. Yes, some of that goes on today, but medical knowledge is expanding at an alarming rate, and the rate of cross-referrals and specialization isn't really keeping up.
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