[Mental training--does it also help the modern surgeon?]

Abstract

The demands on the modern surgeon are extremely complex. Especially in endoscopic surgery he must be able to carry out most complicated finemotoric motions which are not part of the natural action repertoire, sometimes under extreme conditions of stress. Such demands can be compared to those of top athletes. Within a cooperative project between the second chair of surgery of the University of Cologne and the sport psychologic working unit of the Heidelberg University department of sport and sports science the empirically sound Mental Practice (MP) which has been successfully applied in worldclass sports for a long time was modified so that an application of this training method is now possible for the training and continuing education of young surgeons. The following four types of surgery were emphasized: laparoscopic cholecystectomy, laparoscopic appendectomy, thyroidectomy and inguinal hernia. The article will focus on the detailed description of MP in surgery. At first, however, we are going to delineate MP in sports and will then turn to how it is modified and applied in the field of surgery. Besides the arrangement and exact description of surgeries, MP in this field requires the formulation of instructions which are summarized in instructional handbooks. These handbooks serve as target values for instrumental and cognitive simulation techniques which are applied in MP. The surgeon is thus provided with a foundation for the construction of functional mental representations of the surgery types which enables him to optimize the quality of his actions during the above mentioned surgeries.