profession
Drinking night before impairs surgeon's skills the next day
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted May 2, 2011
Surgeons who become intoxicated the evening before surgery are prone to errors in the operating room, says a study in the April issue of Archives of Surgery.
In related experiments, researchers evaluated the performance of laparoscopic students and experts after a night of drinking. Sixteen students at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, were randomly selected to either drink or abstain from alcohol, and eight experts at Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut were instructed to drink.
All participants trained on the Minimally Invasive Surgical Trainer Virtual Reality. Those in the drinking groups ate dinner and consumed alcohol until intoxicated, said the study (link).
Subjects were evaluated the next day at 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on how long it took them to conduct the MIST-VR, how well they used diathermy and whether they made errors. Surgeons in the alcohol groups showed deterioration on all performance measures, even as late as 4 p.m.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/05/02/prbf0502.htm.
