In the future, managing pain may involve putting on a helmet and entering another world. I'm Jonathan Strickland and this is text up Daily. In the nineteen nineties, VR became a big tech buzzword that had a lot of hype behind it. From Hollywood to mainstream reporting. It seemed like everyone was convinced that we would soon be entering virtual realms for the most mundane computer transactions. Everything from games
to shopping would be affected. Any experience you had in the real world could be and would be simulated and enhanced in the virtual one. But the technology of VR at the time was fairly primitive and incredibly expensive. The experience of using VR did not match up to the ones that people expected. Interest in the field began to wane, and soon VR pioneers found themselves struggling to make progress
and to raise money needed for research and development. That didn't stop VR from evolving, however, and one the areas of research that showed promise was in medicine. Working with doctors of different disciplines, VR experts have found that virtual reality can be an effective method to treat certain conditions and pain itself. For example, doctors have seen great success when using virtual reality to help patients deal with anxiety or even phobias. Virtual reality exposure therapy has been used
to reduce the impact phobias can have. VR gives people the chance to progress through cognitive behavioral therapy, identifying the thoughts that lead to negative feelings and finding ways to replace those thoughts with more positive ones. Doctors pair this within vivo exposure therapy. One interesting thing is that people can and do go through the same emotional reactions when they encounter a virtual representation of their fear as they
would with the real thing. A person afraid of heights will feel his or her body react to being on a virtual skyscraper as it would in a real location. Because the patient knows they are in reality within a safe physical environment, they don't necessarily feel as much anxiety leading up to the therapy. This helps them cope with the experience and use various techniques to deal with their fears. The same is true with therapy designed to treat general anxiety.
VR in many ways helps people explore techniques like meditation, which have been proven to work as a coping mechanism, but doctors rarely suggest meditation to patients. Largely because such advice often goes unheeded. VR can also be used to help deal with acute pain. Hunter Hoffman, a researcher at the University of Washington, has done a great deal of work exploring this use of VR. Some of that work
includes helping to distract burn patients during wound care. Patients with burns must have their wounds cleaned frequently, a process as often accompanied by severe acute pain. Hoffman's work has found that when patients participate in an immersive virtual experience, they tend to register less pain than if they were to watch a meditative video or do nothing at all. Patients have reported experience as much as twenty five percent
less pain than they would feel otherwise. This is tremendous news. If VR can be used to help treat people's pain, it can reduce their dependence upon powerful pain killers. In the United States, opioids, drugs that are similar to opium and that bind to one or more of the three opioid receptors of the body, are a big problem. Opioid use can be accompanied by a sense of euphoria as well as pain relief. This has led some people to misuse the drugs even following the directions of medical staff
can lead to a dependence upon opioids. Misuse can also lead to overdoses, which can be fatal. Creating a new method to help manage pain could literally save lives. It's fair to point out, though, that while VR is a relatively new technology, the technique to reduce pain by giving the brain a different task to focus upon isn't new. Whether it is meditation or some other task, people have known for centuries that occupying the brain can cut down
on the amount of pain we consciously experience. The hypothesis for what is going on goes like this, Pain is communicated through our nervous system. The pain signals come from our peripheral nervous system to our brains, which then register the signals and produce the sensation of pain. When we focus on another task or experience, we shut down some of those pathways that otherwise would allow pain to get through.
Your brain is too busy to feel pain, I imagine this is what Patrick Swayzy's brain was doing through most of Roadhouse. While VR has become an effective tool for treating acute pain, the question remains whether or not it will be equally as useful when dealing with chronic pain. Much of that is dependent upon the patient following instructions and using the VR hardware to go into a virtual environment.
It's possible that future hospitals will put post op patients through virtual reality pain management sessions, improving their overall quality of life while avoiding the use of chemical pain suppressants. That's all for today. To learn more about virtual reality and medicine, subscribe to the tech Stuff podcast. We explore these and other tech topics in much greater detail. See You Against It.