Skip to main content
MedicalMindfulnessResearchScienceSenior Living

Relax & Distract: Less Pain with Therapeutic Virtual Reality

Pain can wreak havoc on a persons mental state. Prescription medicine may help but it’s not always a viable solution. What if a does of Virtual Reality could help to distract patients from feelings of pain and help to treat medical issues?

These questions, and more, are being studied by researchers and have been for years.

According to Virtual Reality for Persistent Pain: A New Direction for Behavioral Pain Management
“VR-based behavioral interventions have been used in acute pain management for over a decade []. VR-based interventions often have been developed as an adjunctive intervention designed to distract patients from acute pain that has not responded to conventional approaches (e.g. opioid medications) [,,,]. The rationale for using VR-based distraction for acute pain is that since pain requires conscious attention, VR draws attention into the computer-generated world, leaving less attention available to process incoming pain signals… In most VR approaches to acute pain management, an immersive virtual environment is selected that is likely to divert attention away from acute pain such as Snow World [,].
In Snow World, patients can use a computer mouse to maneuver around and interact with (e.g. by throwing snowballs at snowmen, penguins, and wooly mammoths) a snow covered virtual environment while listening to music. Display devices that can be used to display virtual environments used in distraction interventions can range in complexity and cost from fully immersive environments such as Snow World displayed in a wide field of view, high-resolution head-mounted display on the high end, to desktop computers using inexpensive polarized or shutter glasses in combination with stereoscopic projectors or large 3-D monitors.”

But the future is even more bright with the potential for hyper-personalized treatment -in home.

Close Menu