Hospitals to Bring Nintendo Wii to Physical Therapy

To help spice up and/or improve physical therapy programs, hospitals are adding Nintendo Wii consoles to the proper offices. The reasons behind putting consoles in a hospital are simple. For one thing, the Nintendo Wii simply makes physical therapy more fun. Renowned doctors throughout America have found that there are other reasons. When a game requires users to make repetitive movements that might otherwise cause them pain, the game distracts from the pain, allowing the patient to do necessary exercises. To help confirm what these doctors already know, and have put into hospitals such as the Hines Veterans Affairs Hospital west of Chicago and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the University of Minnesota is performing a study on the effects of the Nintendo Wii to physical therapy. If all goes well, the results will confirm that playing the Nintendo Wii is beneficial to things such as endurance, strength, flexibility, balance, and cardio.