Did you Know Video Games Can Heal the Sick

Games both video and computer have been for years looked down on as evil and a negative influence on society. However, recent research indicates that games play a significant role in healing. Studies indicate that playing games helps divert a patient’s mind from pain and for many patients, games are a form of physiotherapy as they exercise the fingers and muscles of the arms and oil the wheels of the mind. In fact, children suffering from autism learn a great many social skills from games they play.

Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University, has conducted in depth studies on gaming and found that “gaming can be a useful tool in healthcare, games can distract kids and adults undergoing painful treatments.” In fact children undergoing chemotherapy for diseases like sickle cell anemia deal with the disease better when they play games that absorb their attention completely. Sick children who occupied their minds playing video or computer games required lower doses of pain medication and tended to suffer less from hypertension and nausea than children who were asked to just rest. According to Griffiths an expert in the field, games benefit children suffering from attention deficit disorders too.

A conference on gaming showcased the fact that computer and video games promoted awareness in nutrition, lifestyle choices, and medical skills. According to experts, games helped reduce stress and healed people with phobias, diabetes, asthma, and cardiac diseases.

Games did not just promote anger and aggression but improved co-ordination skills, focus, and concentration, and steadied elevated blood pressure and pulse beating. Games are now playing a definitive role in therapy. Some games introduce images or stimulus to the mind like aromas or natural happenings like a river flowing or an avalanche. Many studies are focusing on “The state of Cognitive Exercise with digital Game Play,” where the use of games in treating diseases like Alzheimer is being addressed.

That gaming is recognized as a healer by medical communities across the US is established by the fact that the “Get-Well Gamers Foundation” collects unused games and consoles from avid gamers for distribution to children’s wards at hospitals across the US.

The new regimen in healing is to combine exercises with gaming. For example a patient who needs to be motivated to complete therapy sessions can be induced by connecting the bicycle to a video game that engages the patient’s mind. Ciprian Docan of Rutgers University has modified a home video game to assist stroke patients with hand movements and exercises.

Work by Karen Grimmer and her team in Adelaide Women and Children’s hospital showed that children suffering from severe burns feel less pain and discomfort when their minds are completely immersed in a virtual reality game. Games therefore served as appositive healing tool and helped children overcome great pan and discomfort.

Contrary to popular beliefs video and computer games do have a positive side and, all over the world serious studies are in progress of how games can be utilized in health care.

About the Author:
Aaron Brooks is a freelance writer for 1888FreeOnlineGames , the premier website to play thousands of free online games including arcade games, action games, card games, flash games, strategy games, puzzle games and more

By RISHABH JAIN with

How to Make a Fool Out of Yourself at a Protest Event

Protests can be amazing events--both for the cause and for the participants. They can also get messy. Here are five things you shouldn't do at a protest...unless, of course, you're trying to make a fool out of yourself.

1. Break formation.

If you have a good reason to leave the protest event--if you need to take a bathroom break, say, or return a phone call, or change a diaper, or just rest your weary bones--then of course that's fine. But when you leave the protest event, leave the protest event. Don't try to go off and start a second, competing protest event nearby because you think you've found a more visible or convenient location; that just dilutes your visible numbers.

2. Start a revolution.

If you're protesting for change, that's great. If you're protesting to change a protest for change, you're just being silly. The organizers' strategies should define the protest. If you want to do things differently, make suggestions to the organizers or run your own protest later--but don't fight the organizers over control of the existing protest.

During a pro-choice protest last year, we were ordered by police to leave our main event at Smith Park due to a bomb threat. We regrouped across the street, outside the Governor's Mansion. One earnest young man gave what was probably supposed to be a rousing pep speech encouraging all of us to charge past police and reenter Smith Park in force. We all just kind of looked at him funny.

3. Go off-message.

Most protest events are single-issue protests, and they bring in people with a wide range of views. If you're protesting the death penalty, for example, the group will probably include both socially conservative Roman Catholics and socially progressive civil libertarians. Good slogans will be slogans that all, or nearly all, participants can join together and chant. Good signs will be signs that further the basic message of the protest.

So if you're at an anti-death penalty rally, don't try to start a "My body, my choice!" or "No blood for oil!" chant. That screws up the cohesion of the group, and distracts observers from the central message of the protest.

4. Act like a jerk.

This is America, and everyone has the right to their beliefs. Whatever cause you support, counterprotesters have as much right to protest your event as you have to stage it in the first place--and you have the right to do the same. But neither of you has the right to disrupt the other group's event. Make sure they know you're there, but keep a comfortable distance and let them do their thing.

There is a video making the rounds on YouTube of a young woman interrupting a socially conservative event by entering the crowd, then screaming and howling epithets at the top of her lungs right in the face of a young man timidly holding a Bible. If this incident wasn't staged, it may as well have been; it was great PR for the guy with the Bible.

5. Get arrested for no good reason.

Earlier this year, members of a gay rights organization were arrested for marching onto the campus of privately-owned Mississippi College after being specifically told not to by police. So what were these folks protesting? The college's homophobic policies? Seems to me they were protesting trespassing laws.

Likewise, antiwar protesters who take off their clothes in public aren't being arrested over the war. They're being arrested for violating indecent exposure laws, effectively transforming the protest event from an antiwar protest to a pro-public nudity protest.

If you're willing to get arrested for doing the right thing, that's great. But if you're going out there and getting arrested just for the hell of it, why bother?

The Bottom Line

Ask yourself why you're going to this protest event. If you support the cause, then everything you do at that event should be conducive to that goal. If what you're planning to do will screw up the protest event or otherwise hurt the cause, don't do it.

By RISHABH JAIN with