Beyond its leisure and industrial applications, virtual reality is proving itself an indispensable tool in Healthcare. Trainee medical professionals now use VR and AR in their studies and training, whilst surgeons are using the technology on the job with increasing regularity. But it’s not just medical professionals who are benefitting from the use of virtual reality in Healthcare. The applications for patients are also wide-ranging.
Pain Relief
The usual method of pain relief is, of course, medication. It’s effective, no doubt. But it is also fraught with dangers. The body can react badly, it can overdose, or it can become dependent. Drugs are also costly for the health service, they are a resource that must be constantly replenished. An alternative would be highly beneficial all round.
VR might just be that alternative. Clinical trials have already found that an immersive virtual reality experience can be powerful enough to treat pain. Firstly, it’s a distraction from the pain. But it goes further than this. Studies have found that VR therapy actually affects the brain in a way that reduces the actual feeling of pain.
"When people use it, for the most part, it reduces their pain quite considerably, so within in the course of five minutes the pain will drop from about five-and-a-half points to four points on a ten-point scale," Dr Brennan Spiegel, director of Cedars-Sinai Health Services Research, recently told CGTN America. "That's pretty dramatic for not using any narcotics, no medications, no medical intervention, just the experience of being transported away from where you physically are."
The question is, however, how is it most effective? Using virtual reality pain relief for short-term periods of pain, such as during a painful physical therapy session, is likely to be more effective than as a remedy for chronic pain. Some studies have found that the painkilling effects of VR become less powerful as participants became more accustomed to the experience. Whether this could be solved with better VR experiences themselves is a question still to be answered.
Phobias and PTSD
Virtual reality is especially useful for exposure therapy, in which a patient is introduced to and slowly exposed to a traumatic stimulus. Patients can safely interact with a virtual representation of their phobia whilst being able to totally remove themselves from the situation if it becomes too much. Equally, it’s less resource-intensive overall, as there’s no need for the therapist to source the real-life counterpart of the phobic object.
Virtual reality treatment for phobias is particularly useful when it comes to the treatment of small animal phobias, such as arachnophobia. However, studies have also found it useful for treating fear of public speaking (glossophobia) and claustrophobia.
Phobias can be effectively treated with VR, but perhaps more interesting is the technology’s effectiveness at treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Using the same method, exposure therapy, that is used for the treatment of phobias, therapists using virtual reality for PTSD treatment can place patients into triggering situations in VR. This can be done either through flooding, in which the patient is directly confronted with their most triggering stimuli first, or graded-exposure, where the patient is gradually introduced to more and more distressing stimuli. With guidance, the patient grows increasingly accustomed to the scenario until it no longer poses a problem.
These are just two areas in which virtual reality therapy is demonstrating significant potential. Its therapeutic benefits extend beyond pain relief and exposure therapy, having shown beneficial results in treatment of autism, depression, eating disorders, and stroke patients, for example. The applications for virtual reality in Healthcare are far-reaching, and we are only just seeing the beginnings of how the future of therapy could look in the virtual era.
