Playing virtual reality games or relaxing in a virtual nature setting might help ease chronic pain, particularly when symptoms are severe, a new experiment suggests.
The 120 hospitalized patients in the study had rated their pain as at least a 3 out of 10 over the previous 24 hours. Half of the patients were chosen at random to use virtual reality headsets three times a day over the next 48 hours; the other half served as a control group and were told to watch health and wellness programming on the television in their rooms that included guided relaxations, poetry readings and health topic discussions. With virtual reality (VR), patients reported an average decline in pain scores of 1.72 points, compared with an average decrease of 0.46 points for the control group.
"We found that VR helped reduce pain across many types of pain - gastrointestinal, cancer, orthopedic, neurologic, etc. - and that it reduced pain the most in people with the most severe pain," said Dr Brennan Spiegel, lead author of the study and a professor of medicine and public health at Cedars-Sinai Health System and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Pain ratings of 0 represented no pain at all and scores of 10 represented the worst pain imaginable.
Among people who initially rated their pain at least a 7 out of 10, average pain score reductions were 3.04 points with VR compared with 0.93 in the control group. While the experiment wasn't designed to test how VR helps to ease pain, it may work in several ways, Spiegel said.
"It creates an illusion of time acceleration, effectively shortening the length of pain episodes," Spiegel said. "And it nips signals in the bud at their origin, blocking pain from reaching the brain."
Virtual reality technology has been around for decades, first coming to prominence when the military used it for flight simulators. The earliest hardware filled an entire room, but as the technology has become smaller and cheaper to produce, it's increasingly being used for a variety of medical purposes including trauma and phobia therapies, wound care, physical therapy, dental pain relief and burn treatment.