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 Distraction may indeed play a role in pain relief, the review of six
small studies suggests. But it’s also possible that the technology
could help produce changes in the nervous system when it’s used to
help reprogram how a person responds to pain.
“Guided imagery has long been a treatment for psychological
disorders, and virtual reality is a more immersive way to provide
guided imagery,” said lead study author Dr. Anita Gupta of the
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at
Princeton University in New Jersey.
“More research is needed to tell if virtual reality is truly
effective, but having more options to treat pain is promising,”
Gupta said by email.
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 wound care, physical
therapy, dental pain relief and burn treatment.
Today, mass-produced virtual reality devices may require no more
than a smartphone and special headsets to operate, and a growing
number of people use these gadgets to play video games and take
lifelike, three-dimensional tours of places they might not be able
to visit in real life.
For the current study, researchers reviewed articles published from
2000 to 2016 that explored different ways virtual reality might
augment pain relief.
Altogether, researchers identified four small experiments that
randomly assigned some patients to try virtual reality for pain
relief as well as two pilot studies of the technology for this use.
In addition to acute pain, several studies looked at chronic pain
states such as headaches or fibromyalgia. These studies also
combined virtual reality with other treatments such as biofeedback
mechanisms and cognitive behavioral therapy.
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Taken together, the results from the small studies in the current
analysis suggest that virtual reality might help with what’s known
as conditioning and exposure therapy, a form of behavior therapy
that involves helping patients change their response to pain when
they feel it.
More research in larger groups of patients is needed to draw firm
conclusions about how well virtual reality works for pain relief,
the authors caution in the journal Pain Medicine.
But the results suggest that virtual reality treatments for chronic
pain might help reduce reliance on opioid painkillers and
potentially help curb misuse of these addictive medications.
Patients need to understand that virtual reality is just a tool to
design treatments, and not a treatment by itself, said Max Ortiz
Catalan, a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in
Gothenburg, Sweden, who wasn’t involved in the current study.
“You can’t prescribe virtual reality, but treatments that employ it,
and the methods of such treatments are what matters,” he said by
email. “Two different methods can use virtual reality and one works
while the other doesn’t depending on how virtual reality is used.”
Side effects of virtual reality can include motion sickness, nausea
and dizziness, Gupta said.
Still, it’s a non-invasive approach option that is becoming more
widely available and more affordable.
“I would certainly try this as part of a traditional treatment plan
with routine guidance from a board-certified pain specialist who
understands the risks and benefits of all treatments involved and
what works best,” Gupta said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2y4gtbO Pain Medicine, online August 31, 2017.
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