Tendo City

But not THAT kind. You know, like they kind where you...anyway, this is the real kind.

Quote:Trauma Center: Under the Knife, previously known as Cadeceus, lets YOU play doctor, performing increasingly complex surgeries. At first it's just another day in the O.R., but when a mysterious outbreak sweeps the area, the patients' lives are in your hands-no pressure.

The stylus will be your scalpel as you make incisions, anesthetize problem areas, remove tumors, monitor vital signs, apply bandages, and more! Of course, you'll also have to deal with human drama between appointments.

Video Clip

This actually looks like it might be pretty fun. Plus, the nurse is kind of cute.

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It's not a tuhmah!!

Cube-Europe

Operation DS!

Sort of!

I remember a game like this for PC years ago, like 1993ish.

I just hope I get to use a bone saw.

This actually sounds kinda cool. This is the type of innovation the DS sorely needs.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:I remember a game like this for PC years ago, like 1993ish.

I just hope I get to use a bone saw.

I remember that game. I also remember killing my first patient and giving up.

Did you watch the video clip? It's pretty cool.

Man this was announced around the same time as the DS. Hope it turns out good.

I can't wait to botch surgeries!

And I can't wait to get sick from seeing too many realistic medical proceedings!

WOO!

You know it!!

If it's for the DS they need to make it interactive, maybe Nintendo put a shock feature in the DS they haven't used yet!

I know! They could make it like if you botch a sugery or something the family of the person you were operating on sues you for 100 million dollars!

hahaha if you watch the movie, someone on the operating table has a Los Plagas :D

Great Rumbler Wrote:I know! They could make it like if you botch a sugery or something the family of the person you were operating on sues you for 100 million dollars!

And since you wouldn't have a real medical license they would take the game from you as well!

Better go find some homeless people that nobody will miss to practice on before you start playing the game.

From first hand experience, the OR is over rated...

I wonder if there will be an option to "forget" and leave scissors or something inside the patient :D

Over rated you say? You mean, the place where people SAVE YOUR LIFE? Well, I suppose if living isn't that big a deal, sure.

One thing, whatever story you may relate, I must inform you that anecdotal evidence is not valid scientific evidence.

As for the game, leaving stuff inside accidentally? Yeah, that's cool that's cool... But um... actually I was thinking more like taking bits of stuff FROM the patient they "won't notice" to complete your secret "project" in the sub basement :D.

And also at awkward times the DS will turn itself on and make loud noises until you pick it up, because there's an emergency in the OR and you have to begin operating IMMEDIATELY.

Quote:And also at awkward times the DS will turn itself on and make loud noises until you pick it up, because there's an emergency in the OR and you have to begin operating IMMEDIATELY.

LOL, that's my favorite feature so far.

Oh, OH! Yeah! And the operations last for 8 or 9 HOURS on end, and right after that, you have 3 minutes to DASH to the next theater for another operating marathon!

You will be allowed exactly 2 HOURS of sleep every 2 days.

that would be so awesome :D

The DS somehow calls you on your cellphone telling you that you need to come in because the other doctors have been killed in a helicopter crash and there's a flood... in kentucky... and you dont have any of your gear and you have to use household items to save lives so instead of a scalpel.... you use a can opener and instead of a stethascope you use....... your ear..... well, whatever. sleep now.

OR isn't the only place doctors save lives you know...

Not that the OR isn't important, but its over rated because its not where most of medicine happens, and the general public have a pretty skewed "magical" view of the OR. In reality, the OR is a pretty depressing place to be, and surgeons to be pretty depressing people to hang around, if you even want to hang around them to start with.

Oh well, this still looks like a cool game.

Yeah I'm aware of that, and I'm aware a lot of the work takes place elsewhere. I'm just saying operations SAVE LIVES.

Sorry, when you first said that I made the uninformed, but hidden, assumption you were the sort of person who thought modern medicine was "evil" and the true healing is done with quackery like "homeopathy" or "acupuncture" or "magical crystals". I'm sorry about that...

Dude... I'm a medical student. What the hell were you thinking ? :)

Btw, accupuncture works.

I was not aware of this, but what field are you studying, and what are they teaching you?

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRela...s/acu.html

I'm afraid that this "strange eastern medicine" does NOT work. It has failed double blind studies. Sorry, but acupuncture is quackery. Medical student or not, you really need to look into whatever source you got information on this from.

Everyone wants to say something different. One article doesn't mean anything in medicine.

If accupuncture doesn't work, the NIH would not be intensely studying it right now. In otherwords, what has led the NIH to study accupuncture intensely is the fact that there is a body of evidence that points in that the direction that it works. Everyone has their biases. Alot of die hard western medicine docs will absolutely do everything to say every other type of medicine doesn't work, which is true for the most part. However, as I said above, the body of evidence, at least in the US shows a promise. The research from China, Korea, and Japan are quite different and rather show quite conclusively that accupunture is very effective in many fields of medicine. China continues national medical research system to research accupunture as it has worked for thousands of years.

I'd suggest you don't presume to teach me about medicine because the internet will give you a skewed view, and without the context of medical training, you'll end up drawing many false conclusions.

Whats real quackery ? Homeopathy is quackery. The entire body of evidence says its fake all across the world. Thats why homeopathic doctors can't even draw on scientific evidence. Hell you don't even need a liscense to practice homeopathy here in the US. Even you can go out and open a shop right now, and legally call yourself a homeopathic doctor.

Also, if I can add... the scientific theory behind accupuncture is the use of stimulation of the nervous system. While eastern medicine has figured this out (although the terminology is quite different), the nervous system is increasingly found to have control over almost every aspect of the body including your blood pressure, your immune system, etc. While words like yin and yang might translate to anabolism and catabolism in western science, the concept of qi and qi channels may be associated with nervous pathways. While the stimulation of accupoints don't hit nerves, they may affect tissue in such a way that they subsequently cause nerves in the surrounding area to send of certain messages which subsequently affect the body in ways described in Chinese medicine. This relationship between nervous system and qi channels has not been elucidated, but it remains the theory. So for example, stimulating such and such accupoints can affect the nervous system to upregulate the immune system in such a way to help you fight off an infectious disease, or perhaps prevent you from catching diseases during a period of stress, or help fight cancer.

The bottom line is the affect exists, whether or not we know how it works. Like much of medicine, many treatments western medicine has are also known to work, but it is scientifically unknown as to why they work.

"Western Medicine' is a silly statement, suggesting that scientific evidence is a european concept exclusively.

What I'm saying is this. Background in it or no, I am still capable of basic logic, and I only gave one link here. The general consensus among the skeptics is that yes, it really is just nonsense. The sad truth is, a lot of pretty stupid stuff is getting government approval in various bad ways. Now on the other hand, chiropractic, in the sense of spinal adjustments alleviating certain symptoms, seems to be showing some positive results.

I haven't studied medicine, no, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to challenge the knowledge of one who has/is, especially when I have good reason to doubt certain things.

http://skepdic.com/acupunc.html

According to this, some very limited applications of it DO show some promise. This is far from the entire claim being proven, but it does show needle sticking can do some beneficial things, completely unrelated to "chi" nonsense of course.

At any rate, in listing it, I was specifically speaking of the standard claims as opposed to limited stuff that could be called the same thing that show good promise. The standard claims I hear are things like it can cure cancer.

And yes, science doesn't need to have an explanation of HOW somethign works to prove that there IS an effect. But, it does need to prove the effect. Your second post seems to be an unquestioning endorsement. You seem to be saying "we'll eventually figure out how it works, they use different terms, but hey, it works". Sorry, but you need to prove it works scientifically. Different terms? Well, if their terms are in the lines of pseudoscience, sorry but they need to prove it. You must show the effect to be real first. This MUST be shown by science by the way, not by "eastern methods", whatever that means.

Don't be so quick to make science seem limited to "the west". That suggest that if I only take science to be accurate, I'm ignoring "the east". Nope. Science is on both sides, and silly nonsense is on both sides too.

Western medicine generally refers not to "scientific method." It rather refers to the medical tradition that grew from Europe and America, and namely, a 300 or so year old tradition of allopathic medicine. Is western medicine scientific ? It is in many parts, but you'd be amazed how much of medicine is not evidence based, but rather rational practice, or trial and error. Its method and history of development is similar to that Chinese medicine, but has made advances by leaps and bounds as a result of technology in the last 50-60 years, which is something Chinese medicine is still striving to catch up to, thanks to communism and the resulting backwardness of China during this breakthrough era.

All in all, western medicine is mostly evidence based, and generally based on the best avaliable evidence as opposed to absolute evidence shown in large randomized, double blinded studies. In many cases, its actually impossible to do double blind studies. For example, you won't be going around inducing random gunshot wounds to test whether or not a certain OR procedure works to extracting bullets, to cite an extreme situation.

Its always amusing to listen to amatuers talk on the subject because of the limited viewpoint. The NIH is interested in accupuncture because for them, it opens up a whole new area of research in nervous system stimulation and its effects. If they can elucidate the mechanism and pinpoint, they can probably figure out ways to enhance it to manipulate just about everything in the body just like Chinese medicine has.

You have to know that many of these skeptics hail from a "tradiition" of western civ chauvanism, and a very limited outlook into medicine to start with. They don't even realize that a LARGE portion of western medicine is not evidence based. Hell, half of the things that neurologists and neurosurgeons are doing is just a shot in the dark. They don't even know what the hell they're doing for the most part. Are we going to call these neuroscience fields quackery ? These "skeptics" probably wouldn't simply because its a specialty of allopathic "western medicine" which they assumed to be evidence based, when it really isn't all evidence based.

Speaking of fighting cancer with accupuncture.... Chinese medical research is split into 3 wings - purely western medicine, purely eastern medicine, and combination medicine of east and west. There have studies showing stage 4 gastric cancer (the type people usually die from) treated alone with chemotherapy is not as effective as chemotherapy with accupuncture, which is still not as effective as chemo, accupuncture, and herbal medicines. A case report from China have shown that combination treatment have brought a patient's whose gastric cancer was refractory to chemotherapy, to have reached near remission with simply the addition of accupuncture. Anectodal, but still the evidence from larger studies show improvement over chemotherapy alone prospective cohort studies.

Keep in mind too that accupuncture is only 1 of many treatment modalities in eastern medicine. Not all diseases are treated with accupuncture in China, and not all are treated with just herbs.

It might also interest you that many of the herbs that Chinese are simply natural sources of the active ingrediants of drugs we use, or have used. After all, the majority of western drugs are based of some kind of plant life anyways. In effect, western drugs are just purified herbal medicines.

Theres no need for medicine to have to prove that everything works although it works. Let me put it this way.

There are for example, children born with intractable seizures. Theres no medication that can treat them. Incidently, someone discovered that somehow or another, some of these kids who are on stimulant drugs have a reduced seizure frequency. In otherwords, the theory is somehow or another, noreadrenergic chemicals in the brain reduce seizures. So we invented a mechanical implant called the Vagal Nerve Stimulator, which helps increase noreadrenergic secretion on the brain. No one really knows how it works, but we send those patients to the neurosurgeon to have some god awful machine put in them and it works.

Another example. There are plenty of people who are depressed. One of medications with growing popularity today is called Wellbutrin, which no one really knows how it works, but it works for treating depression and as well as helps with smoking cessation. Do I need to prove how it works before I trust that it works ? I just need to know that it works and its safe.

Science exists in the east too ? You're right. Do you know that accupuncture has been developed for over 5000 years. Chinese government, like the US government funded much of the research. Just as the US funds the NIH, Chinese dynasties have funded the Imperial Academies to research accupuncture. Today's accupuncture is a result of 5000 years of research, trial and error, refined methodology, rational experimentation, etc. My acceptance of eastern medicine comes out of study, and experience, just like my acceptance of western medicine.

Your little link is kind of funny, noting that how UCLA, which is actually where I go to school, offers training in accupuncture. Look, UCLA has enough confidence in the body of evidence to set up their East West Medicine Center, and the NIH confident enough to pour millions into this realm of research, I think its a pretty good sign that PROFESSIONALS in the field, have analyzed the evidence, and found it convincing. And both of these institutions are run by a bunch of white guys, not Chinese immigrants.

Lets put professionals in the field as ones we should look to for advice as opposed to amateurs, less we turn this world upside down and place people of lesser merit on top and people of merit on the bottom.

Huh.

You fail to understand the scientific approach. Science isn't about "absolute" answers, it can never hope to provide that. Trial and error and rational practice are PART of science. What science does is provide one great strength, self correction. It is capable of seeing where it's wrong and fixing it.

Your examples talk about discovering the mechanism for HOW it works, but have they actually discovered THAT it works? That is the issue at hand here. Before one can offer any explanations, they first must show the phenomenon actually factually exists. You speak of a bias, an egotism, but that is simply not the case for scientists. The ones who are being scientific embrace the fact that they do NOT know everything. On the other hand, those who proport various pseudoscientific claims will cling to any possible thing to show what they "know" to be true. Any evidence showing that something is not true or doesn't work is defended with countless ad hoc explanations.

Both the pages I listed speak of simple rational thought. Many of the mistakes you made are explained right there. How old a treatment is has no bearing on it's validity. How new a treatment is also has no bearing. How many people believe it also has no bearing. The latter however DOES show however that one should pay heed to them though. The only medicine I put any value in is scientifically proven medicine. Part of this IS rational thought. For example, given known facts about the body, and given known facts about the damage that may be done, bullet extraction from odd places can be done with a high degree of confidence in the methods, because of the high chances that the known facts are accurate. The links I provided are not to amateurs who made some pages for fun.

http://www.quackwatch.org/09Advisors/advbd.html

This is the list of scientific and medical advisors for the site "quackwatch". My doubts in what you say are not me doubting "the evil establishment", but rather doubing one who has not yet completed his studies, to defer to the wisdom of those who are professional medical doctors already.

This person (the host of the site) does a lot of research before writing up any articles on any particular bit of quackery. When he is in error, he is quick to correct it and call attention to it, which is actually more important. I didn't just search for some site that takes the same side as me. I've been visiting this site, as well as many other affiliated sites, for some time now. I visit them because I did some research of my own to see exactly how reliable their information is.

Chiefly, I must say this. I don't put 100% faith into any of these sites...

http://www.quackwatch.org/
http://skepdic.com/
http://www.randi.org/
http://www.badastronomy.com/
http://www.skeptic.com/

But I do have high confidence in them. If something strikes me as odd, I question it. At any rate, I will say this. With all I've said, I will admit this. Should evidence show that in fact inserting needles into variuos nerves in the body can and does have a beneficial healing effect (outside pain relief), then I will gladly accept this. I don't know all the details on how nerve signals are encoded mind you, but my knowledge on how signals travel along lines leads me to believe that blunt trauma to the lines leads to nothing more than severing the connection. Thus, I have my doubts.

I must also say you are a very pleasent person to debate with now. This is most enjoyable actually. Certainly, a lot more rationality is present here than elsewhere in Tendo City. Whoever ends up proving their point in this, I can say that it was done with respect and rationality over insulting and emotions.

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What?

This is funny. I don't know the scientific method ? I think you're being pretty radically bold in accusing someone who uses it on a daily basis as part of his job. So I'm curious what standing you have to criticize my lack of understanding of the scientific method. Unless you're a phD or post doc and I don't know about it, I don't think you have that standing. At this point, I'm the one in the position to cast doubt that you have a poor understanding of the scientific method, not the other way around. I'm still wondering after I read what you wrote if you even understand what rational design is ? But since it doesn't look like it, I'll explain. Rational design means that you design a treatment based off of a mechanism known to be true. For example, by rational design, the simplest example I can quote is that antibiotics kills bacteria. So when you get infected, you treat X infection with X drug that can kill that bacteria. The problem is if you were to base your medicine off of evidence, many of the antibiotic treatments such as pre and post surgical antibiotic treatment is all based off of rational design, ie you assume that you can prevent surgical infections by giving patients doses of antibiotics before and after you go to the OR. The problem is that real evidence shows that this is not particularly helpful at preventing OR infections any better than clean technique does. Surgeons still do it anyways because its based of rational design as opposed to evidence. Yet it is proven to scientifically not work. This is just one simple example. Theres plenty of other examples of medical voodoo that is widely in practice. Again, you'd probably probably never trust an MD again if you really knew about this and embrace your idea of not putting any faith in non scientifically proven medicine.

Your limited scope of understanding makes you have a skewed view on how science works. Rational design is what propels ideas and creations forward in engineering, and medical technology for example. Scientific process is only there to evaluate if it works, or if a hypothesized discovery you stumbled upon or a rational design idea you created works or not. And even then, alot of rational designs are not, or cannot evaluated scientifically. As I said, you CANNOT go around shooting people in the stomach so you can test a new technology for surgical extraction of the bullet. You can only test it in the limited situation where someone got shot in the field and you'd like to try to test your new technique. Its not entirely scientific since you can't control for everything, but its reasonable. The best you could do in the long run is go back into history and check to see where are the limited cases where a you can take X cases and compare them to Y cases in such a manner that is "virtually" controlled and draw a conclusion. That too was not scientific, and all the while, this new technique is being used with only the rational concept that it works well, as opposed to scientifically proven data that it works well.

Here you are claiming rationality, while quickly embracing the stance that accupuncture doesn't work, saying there needs to be evidence. First, are you being rational by ignoring all the evidence that has been generated in research in East Asia. 2nd, by doing that you imply that if it was not studied in the west, that science doesn't count as valid. Finally, you're also discounting the validity of several thousand years of systematic research done by the Chinese. This probably simply stems from a lack of understanding of the history surrounding Chinese science. Most people don't think of Chinese as "scientific" because you live in a Eurocentric world, but the reality is the Chinese until 300 years ago, were way ahead of the West, and the equivalent of scientific methods have been used in Chinese research LONG before Francis Bacon even thought of the name for it. Basically what you're saying is that despite the fact that the Chinese have proven it to themselved scientifically, that doesn't matter to you because when Chinese do science, its all fake, and that if its not developed and tested by the west, it doesn't count as being real science - even if it used the same rationale.

So what is the rational design behind accupuncture ? Over 5000 years back, it was observed by physicians on the battlefield that soldiers who received stab, or arrow wounds in certain points consistently showed less pain compared to other wounds. What those wounds were, its not entirely shown in history, but slowly and gradually, this concept developed into the systematic placement of needles in these same places for pain control. What was the immediately apparent application was its use to control the pain, aches, and moans of soldiers on the battlefield. Since it was observed to be effective, its use was further developed. While this technique was still rudimentary, it was noticed that soldiers receiving these pain control methods also experienced metabolic effects not to be expected in otherwise healthy individuals. While yin yang theory had already existed in China, this discovery merged it with accupuncture. Its well recorded that the use of accupuncture provides analgesia enough to perform minor surgeries on the battlefield such as stitching, extracting arrow heads, etc. In China, this method is still used today without having to elevate to the use of numbing medications for pain control during minor procedures. During the 3 Kingdoms period, the use of opiates were added for additional pain control that allowed for more major surgeries on the battlefield. While surgery never really went any further than battlefield repairs in China, the use of low does anesthetics combined with accupuncture is used in China for major surgery. While it keeps the patient partially awake, it definitely is effective for pain control, and lowers the risk of complications associated with complete anesthesia. This is all based on a rational design that was experimented on systematically to confirm that the rationale worked. And this is how Imperial Chinese academies did their research in medicine.

How many people believe it having a bearing on something's validity ? I must say you're also being bold and unreasonable by discounting the judgement of the scientific community who do this for a living. While there are many situations where people with potential ideas suffer the effect of being pounded down as the nail that sticks out, this is kind of the reverse situation, in which the nail that stuck out was actually surpassed cultural barriers to become accepted. Again, it is a result of a convincing body of evidence, which you were mostly likely not aware of until I spoke of it. And at this point you're probably still willing to put your judgement at higher value than that of professionals who evaluated this data.

Finally, if the only medicine you put in faith is medicine thats scientifically proven, well that means you don't believe in most of medicine anyways. Like I said, most of medicine was accidently discovered, developed rationally as opposed to scientifically. Keep on thinking your way, and you're in for a whole world of surprise and hurt when you go to the doctor and ask to know whats going on, and they tell you, "who the hell knows ?"

I like that commercial where that guy's about to operate on himself with a butter knife and he's talking with the doctor over the phone for instructions and the guy is like, "shouldn't you be doing this?".

Quality entertainment right there.

I've seen that commercial before.

*ahem*

Quote:Atlas' Under the Knife is a quirky title that has probably flown under most people's radars. As Derek Stiles, you're the new doctor in town. However, it seems you still haven't quite gotten used to doing even the most simple tasks. In the first two missions (operations) of the game, your nurse will assist you step-by-step in each facet of the operation, from the first incision to the last stitch.

Before you begin your operation you are usually given information about the patient and how they got their injuries. There is also some great comedy-drama dialogue in the game, which is shown in the form of anime-style characters on the top half of the screen. It works because usually there's more than just you and your nurse present, so you get a variety of hilarious opinions.

The game itself is loads of fun to play. Even when your nurse has to tell you exactly what to do and where to do it, you'll still find yourself enjoying cutting up your patient so you can find cancerous tumors in their pancreas. Adding to this is the fact that you only have a certain amount of time to do the operation before another (competent) doctor has to step in.

If you're not careful, you can also do more harm than help. It's up to you how you want to treat your patient. There are also other ways of treating your patient's injuries, so you don't have to go through the step-by-step progress. You'll also need to monitor the patient's life signs because there are a number of ways that a patient's life signs could fluctuate. At times it will be before the operation even starts, and other times it will be because of something you did, such as trying to remove those tumors too fast.

Needless to say, I can't wait to get my hands on the final version of this game when it hits the US later this fall.

http://www.planetgamecube.com/impression...ile&id=778

I gotta say, I've always thought the whole double-screen/stylus concept was really gimmicky and a rip-off, but this game makes me somewhat reconsider. It's a really cool and creative use of the DS's features. And it also looks like a hentai game. Excellent.