Sometimes a crisis can fuel innovation. With an opioid problem gripping the United States, medical providers are looking for ways to treat patients’ pain without resorting to addictive drugs. Those potential solutions include the use of virtual reality (VR) at institutions such as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Washington Harborview Burn Center.

VR’s usage to treat pain is limited. But a heightened awareness of widespread opioid addiction, the efforts of progressive healthcare providers and technologists, and insurers’ mounting costs to pay for opioid addiction may spur an uptake of virtual reality for medical treatment. The cooperation of an ecosystem spanning businesses and the government will be required for VR to break through for chronic pain treatment.

VR Takes Hold

To casual observers, VR is an immersive experience for playing games and watching movies. In fact, companies use VR for non-entertainment functions such selling cosmetics, training workers to assemble machinery parts, and designing automobiles. In fact, medical providers have been using VR to treat pain for a few decades by tapping into VR’s ability to entertain by transporting users to a different world.

The University of Washington Harborview Burn Center created the first virtual world designed expressly to reduce pain. Known as SnowWorld, the experience distracts patients from intense pain typically experienced during procedures such as burn wound-care sessions. While patients endure a painful treatment, they use a virtual reality headset to enter another world where they can fly through a make-believe canyon and throw snowballs at snowmen and penguins. SnowWorld is the result of research into VR as a pain treatment tool going back to the 1990s at Harborview.

Patients using SnowWorld report experiencing 50 percent less pain than patients using other means to distract themselves (e.g., music). Why? Because virtual reality rewires the Continue reading →