Non Nocere

In medical ethics, the physician's guiding maxim is “Primum Non-Nocere. Primum non-nocere is a Latin phrase that means "first, do no harm." Non-maleficence, derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all medical students are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. In medical education, medical students and doctors need to be exposed to live patients to acquire the necessary skills. However, there is also a necessity to provide optimal treatment and ensure patient safety and well-being. These two needs can sometimes pose a dilemma in medical education. The cost and time needed to train new surgeons and build their competence and confidence to perform surgery independently are also challenging. Residents today must learn over 150 procedures only for orthopedic and spine surgery. In many places, surgeons graduate without having the chance to perform a significant number of procedures they need to learn because of the reduction in training hours due to labor regulations and lack of suitable cases. Furthermore, the WATCH-LEARN-APPLY method used worldwide since the early 20th century is inadequate for modern-day healthcare needs. Simulation is the remedy for these problems. Simulation-based training can be used to design structured learning experiences. It also helps to measure the outcomes of targeted teamwork exercises and overseeing learning objectives. It allows learning and re-learning as often as needed to correct mistakes, enabling the trainee to perfect steps and fine-tune skills to optimize clinical outcomes. Like a flight simulator for pilots’ training, our virtual reality and biomimetic simulators sharpen surgical skills by allowing physicians to simulate the exact steps needed in a surgical operation and reinforce the surgery's steps into the surgeon's consciousness.