Many patients experience severe to excruciating acute pain during a wide range of medical procedures. Excessive pain is an important medical problem that can have long term negative consequences for patients. For example, children often find it scary to visit the dentist (cavities) or the doctor (needles and blood draws), and this early learning (aversive conditioning) can make the patients avoid healthcare. For children severely burned in a fire, pain during physical therapy exercises, and pain during cleaning of severe burn wounds is often severe to excruciating, even when powerful pain medications such as ketamine are used. Psychological factors such as fear, anxiety, expectations of pain can amplify/increase how much pain patients consciously experience. Fortunately, a new psychological pain control technique, VR distraction, can greatly reduce pain. There is growing evidence that immersive virtual reality can dramatically reduce how much pain patients experience during painful medical procedures. Patient look into a pair of virtual reality goggles, and have the illusion of going into a 3D computer generated world called SnowWorld. In SnowWorld, patients throw snowballs at snowmen, penguins, and other objects. Virtual Reality gives patients the illusion of “being there” in SnowWorld instead of being in the hospital. The patient’s attention is so distracted by “going into” virtual reality that their brains have less attention available to process incoming nociceptive signals from the pain receptors. In clinical research studies, patients with severe burn injuries report large and significant reductions in pain during Virtual Reality, and report having significantly “more fun” during wound care during VR. In addition to feeling less pain during VR, fMRI brain scan studies with healthy volunteers show large reductions in pain-related brain activity during virtual reality. Developing new non-pharmacologic analgesics such as VR is an international priority for the future of medicine.
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