Managing Pain through Virtual Reality

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
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

(00:25):
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

(00:46):
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

(01:07):
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

(01:30):
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

(01:51):
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.

(02:13):
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

(02:33):
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

(02:55):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:40):
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

(04:02):
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

(04:24):
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

(04:47):
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.