Fantasy card game for med students

StaphylococcusAureusSbeastie.jpg

The Healing Blade is a card game—based on games like Magic and Pokemon—that's meant to teach future doctors to match a specific bacterial disease to the antibiotic best suited to treating it. Both drugs and diseases are illustrated as mythical creatures, wizards, elves, etc. The card illustration above is for Staphylococcus aureus

It's not too hard to connect strategy games and medicine, co-inventor Dr. Arun Matthews told American Medical News.

"I was struck upon the complexity and yet innate nature of gaming within the choice I would make for putting some of my sick patients on particular antibiotics," he said. "Essentially, in a similar way, when you are playing a complex multi-tiered video game, we are making similar choices by obtaining data from our cultures [and] making risk-management decisions."