The best way to train surgeons may be to remove the stress and make surgery a “hobby”. Under relaxed conditions outside a formal setting, 15 first-year medical students mastered microsurgical suturing and cutting skills in as little as five hour-long sessions!
University of Houston and Methodist Hospital researchers are reporting in Scientific Reports that the best way to train surgeons is to remove the stress of residency programs and make surgery a hobby. Under relaxed conditions outside a formal educational setting, 15 first-year medical students, who aspired one day to become surgeons, mastered microsurgical suturing and cutting skills in as little as five hour-long sessions.
“It appears that by removing external stress factors associated with the notoriously competitive and harsh lifestyle of surgery residencies, stress levels during inanimate surgical training plummet,” said Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor and director of the Computational Physiology Lab at UH. “In five short sessions these students learnt surgery for fun or as a hobby!”