Immersion in virtual reality relieves pain

Immersion in virtual reality relieves pain

After encouraging first results on burn victims, virtual and augmented realities are currently being tested on other pains.

The more we think we are hurting, the more we suffer. This is precisely the interest of augmented reality, and perhaps even more, of virtual reality. Both techniques are significantly different. The first superimposes virtual elements to the real world, hence an augmented reality. Both have already proven effective. A few years ago, American scientists reduced the pain experienced by burn victims with virtual reality by 35 to 50%. As for augmented reality, Swedish and Slovenian rehabilitation specialists have recently shown that it can halve the pain associated with ghost members of amputees.

At the University of Washington, Hunter Hoffman has long been interested in the benefits of virtual reality in the treatment of pain. At the end of the 1990s, his laboratory developed the virtual reality program SnowWorld, to prevent burn victims from suffering martyrdom when their wounds must be reopened in order to be better treated. Once their virtual reality helmet is screwed on the skull, they are immersed in a snowy world where they have to throw snowballs on igloos, penguins and other snowmen. And as early as 2000, the preliminary results, published in the scientific journal Pain and involving two young people burned, are encouraging, immersion in virtual reality being more effective than usual drugs. Since then, this efficacy has been confirmed by many studies.

But how does it work? MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) images have shown that virtual reality affects the activity of different regions involved in emotion management and pain control. At the same time, its use has spread to other applications. Virtual reality has thus been tested for the pains related to dental care, various surgical or medical procedures (endoscopy, punctures, transfusion), and even, at the end of 2016, in the delivery room.

Very effective on phantom limb pain

This is, however, another approach that has been implemented by the team of Max Ortiz-Catalan. Deciding to focus on difficult cases, he and his collaborators invited to participate in their experience of Swedish and Slovenian patients that no treatment would relieve chronic pain related to a ghost member. The device is quite simple. Thanks to a series of sensors, the activity of the remaining muscles of the amputated limb is recorded and processed by artificial intelligence algorithms, which animates in real time a virtual arm, which the volunteer pilots and observes on the screen. Result, after twelve sessions, the intensity and frequency of painful crises halves, their emergence during the night drops by 60%, and one of the volunteers has reduced its consumption of analgesics by 80%.

Promising data that will of course have to be confirmed with real clinical trials. "By manipulating the degree of resemblance of the avatar, virtual reality could also treat a greater number of patients, including those in whom the vision of the missing member triggers some aversion, concludes Anne Kavounoudias, cognitive neuroscience laboratory and sensory at the University of Aix-Marseille. In the long term, combining several senses with the vision, such as, for example, the sensation of movement of the virtual member, could well increase the realism of this virtual therapy and maximize its beneficial effects.