JOHN is 12 and wears a sleek, black helmet on his head as he plays a 3-D virtual reality (VR) computer game. But he’s far from being a spoilt rich kid indulged with the latest hardware. As he swoops and dives through an ice canyon in his mind, a man is doing something excruciatingly painful to his leg.
John is a burns patient. Before he got the headset, he would be given morphine before his treatment began but sometimes even that did not blot out the pain. At those times, John would wish desperately he was somewhere else. Now, thanks to his headset, he can be.
“The pain from burns is among the worst you can experience and the treatment can be almost as bad,” says Hunter Hoffman, director of the VR Analgesia Research Centre at the University of Washington, Seattle, who developed the VR system John was using. “Even with heavy painkillers, the process of removing dead tissue and stretching the skin to preserve elasticity can be agonising.”
So eight years ago Hunter began experimenting by distracting children with a VR device. “We thought it might help because human attention is like a spotlight,” says Hoffman. “We can only attend to a limited number of things at once and when you are immersed in a VR game, you are ignoring what is happening to your wound.” A trial with 12 patients found that VR reduced pain more than twice as effectively as an ordinary computer game. Hunter went on to develop a VR program aimed specifically at burns patients like John, called SnowWorld. This proved to be even more effective.
In order to find out what exactly was happening in the brain while pain was being blocked in this way, Hoffman next set up an experiment which involved putting 39 patients in a brain scanner while a hot metal rod was applied to their feet giving “strong but tolerable levels of pain”. The patients then donned specially designed VR helmets that were not affected by the powerful magnetic field of the scanner and played SnowWorld while getting the hot rods again.
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SnowWorld produced a drop of up to 97 per cent in the activity of areas of the brain involved with handling pain. “This shows that VR not only changes the way people subjectively interpret incoming pain,” says Hunter, “it’s also changing the activity of the brain.”
Two burns centres in New York and Galveston, Texas, have begun using SnowWorld. Now researchers at the University of South Australia are testing its use on Parkinson’s disease patients receiving physical therapy to stretch their muscles after surgery, while at the University of Washington it is being tried on patients undergoing an uncomfortable procedure known as “rigid cystoscopy”.
VR has another application. Conventionally, phobias are treated by bringing patients closer and closer to whatever it is they fear most, so they can discover it is not so bad after all. VR is ideal for making those fears real in the consulting room. Spiderworld takes the patient into a kitchen with a tarantula. One of the first phobics to use it was a woman, dubbed “Miss Muffet”, who had been terrified of spiders for 20 years, taping up her windows every night in case any got in. After 10 one-hour sessions she could hold a live tarantula for several minutes.
More than 300 people in the United States have been successfully treated for phobias with VR programs and two software companies are leasing VR programs to psychologists.