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Who said playing video games was bad for you? Once the consternation of parents, video games are now credited for something positive instead of being blamed for breeding a generation of gaming geeks lacking motivation to do much else besides twiddle a joystick.

Nintendo's Wii game system with its revolutionary movement-based controls, are finding a welcome place in thousands of rehabilitation hospitals. It turns out that the unique, motion-sensitive control system employed in games ranging from tennis to baseball and bowling, is helping people of all ages recover from strokes, broken bones, surgery and even combat injuries.

Physical therapy (known as PT) is commonly referred to by patients as Pain & Torture. Typically, they find the repetitive exercises boring at the least, and excruciatingly painful, at the most.

The movements required to play are very similar to traditional therapy exercises. During the video game therapy, the patients get so engrossed in the competitive virtual world that the usual boredom and pains associated with the therapy are almost non-existent.

Nintendo executives are as surprised as the hospital and clinic directors at how helpful and popular the Wii has become. The practice has become so widespread, a new word was rose up to describe the phenomenon: Wii-hab.

As thousands of spinal injury patients, burn victims, injured soldiers and others play their way to recovery, think for a minute how innovative and practical this will be just a few years from now.

With technology advancing each year by leaps and bounds, it may be no time at all where medicine, therapy and gaming technology purposely work together to bring sight to the blind, or music to someone that has never heard a note their entire life. Millions around the world with spinal cord injuries may someday walk again with help from some combination of surgical procedure, software and virtual controls that stemmed from developments in the video game industry.

While medicine may never able to fully reverse some of these profound physical handicaps, imagine how thrilling it would be for someone that has never walked on their own two feet before to virtually climb a mountain or jog barefooted down a beach. How life-changing would it be for a person so profoundly disabled that they cant speak or write to be able to communicate with loved ones with the aid of a computer screen, or to sing a song with a computer-generated voice?

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