Preliminary evaluation of a virtual reality-based simulator for learning spinal anesthesia.

Study Objective: To evaluate the influence of a simulation-based program on the initial performance of dural puncture by medical interns, and to refine the design of simulator-based teaching and competence assessment.

Design: Prospective interventional study.

Setting: Academic medical center.

Testing haptic sensations for spinal anesthesia.

Background And Objectives: Having identified key determinants of teaching and learning spinal anesthesia, it was necessary to characterize and render the haptic sensations (feeling of touch) associated with needle insertion in the lower back. The approach used is to match recreated sensations (eg, "pop" through skin or dura mater) with experts' perceptions of the equivalent clinical events.

Methods: The study was performed using a haptic device (Phantom Desktop) that simulated the tactile elements of predefined clinical events.

[Neurophenomenological analysis of the therapeutic relationship in ritual healing].

In this essay we examine some phenomena of community rituals, especially healing ceremonials, which are considered neurobiologically mediated, complex forms of attachment. Recent studies in medical anthropology have pointed out that the ritual therapeutic experience relies on the patients' own healing processes by means of various altered states of consciousness that healers are able to control. Ritual trance invariably occurs in social context, and the healer's personality and the expectations of the community are profoundly involved in the induction of altered states of consciousness.

Perceptional and executive deficits of chronic schizophrenic patients in attentional and intentional tasks.

The present study investigated whether schizophrenic patients could develop appropriate visual orientation and motor set under precuing conditions which contrasted attentional (input selective) and intentional (output selective) information. The aim was to evaluate perceptual performance in processing visuospatial information, and executive performance in response preparation. Stimuli and/or elicited responses were controlled for selective hemispheric engagement.