It's official: playing games makes you a better surgeon

Parents! Don't tear little Johnny away from his Xbox just yet. Even if he has been playing it for three days solid and is starting to whiff.

It turns out that playing games improves the skills of surgeons performing keyhole surgery. No, not while they're actually performing it. A study at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York showed that doctors who'd previously played games for at least three hours a week made 37% less errors during surgery, and were 27% faster.

It's the answer to all the NHS' woes! Give every surgeon a DS and a copy of 'Trauma Centre: Under The Knife', and we're sorted! And if Nintendo could make a hospital-cleaning simulation too, we could sort out that pesky MRSA problem while we're at it...

(via Scientific American)