Experiences like “The Climb” don’t seem to have been used by researchers so far, but as patients ask for more immersive experiences, the rapidly growing VR library has a lot to offer.
The entire purpose of pain is to make sure it’s the main focus of your attention, to make it so you don’t focus on anything else.
That makes sense, since pain is how your brain tells you that something is wrong. Your nerves sense damage in your body and send a signal to your brain that tells you to feel HURT.
If you’ve accidentally placed your hand into a pan full of hot oil, that reaction is a good thing — you want to instantly recoil, minimizing the damage done by the burn.
But the ongoing pain you might feel from a severe wound or burn is in many ways less useful, especially if it’s something that’s already been treated and now we just need to let heal. We already know that we need to recover, meaning that feeling of “pain” coming from the brain is no longer providing valuable information. It’s just hijacking all our attention.
The same is true for hospital patients undergoing painful treatments or procedures — yes, some of these things do hurt, and in this case, the “hurt” isn’t helpful.
Our standard treatment for this sort of situation involves drugs, especially powerful opiate painkillers. But these drugs are dangerous, and if overused, they have severe addictive potential. There are good reasons to try to find alternative solutions.
Right now, an ongoing clinical trial at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles is testing virtual reality as a way to deal with the pain and anxiety that patients in the hospital are experiencing. So far, the results from this study and from previous work in this area are promising. It seems that the immersive experience of VR is powerful enough to help treat pain — not just to distract people, but to actually affect the brain in ways that reduce the feeling of hurt.
This is cool not just because VR is fun and interesting (though it is!), but because it shows how by using an alternate — and in this case non-pharmacological — pathway we can change our experience of the world. It’s a psychoactive effect without the need for a substance. And it’s something that improves people’s lives while lowering their exposure to dangerous drugs. There are still big questions about how effective this might be on a larger scale and who it could make the biggest difference for, but so far, results are exciting.
How VR hijacks the brain to deal with pain
The Cedars-Sinai trial, led by Dr. Brennan Spiegel, is investigating whether brief VR experiences reduce pain and anxiety for patients staying at the hospital. Previous research, highlighted in the Inside Science videobelow, has tested other simple VR games to see if they help burn victims get through the excruciating feelings of pain they experience when having bandages changed or having sensitive parts of their body stretched.
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Source: Business Insider UK