Dose of virtual reality beats pain

When Deona Duke woke up from a medically induced coma to begin recovering from burns that covered almost a third of her body, one of her treatments was hurling snowballs at penguins.

The 13-year-old caught alight when a bonfire exploded on her and her friend.

To prevent infection, burn victims need their bandages changed and dead skin scraped away. Sometimes even morphine is not enough to make that tolerable.

At Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston in the US, Duke's doctors gave her a virtual reality headset. Slipping it on, she was immersed in "SnowWorld", an icy landscape where she got to lob snow at snowmen. The Texas hospital is one of a few trying out virtual reality to relieve pain.

"I'd never heard of it so I was a little surprised," Duke said. "When I first tried it, it distracted me from what they were doing so it helped with the pain."

It's still a new and experimental approach, but proponents of virtual reality say it can be an effective treatment for everything from intense pain to Alzheimer's, to arachnophobia, to depression.

The idea is that the worst pain can be alleviated by manipulating the way the mind works: the more you focus on pain, the worse it feels. Swamp the brain with an overload of sensory inputs - such as immersion in a virtual world - and its capacity to process pain, to be conscious of it, goes down.

"Pain is our harm alarm and it does a really good job of getting our attention," said Beth Darnall, a clinical associate professor at Stanford Health Care's division of pain medicine. She says VR, which Stanford has done pilot studies on, is a psychological tool, like meditation, that can "calm the nervous system, and dampens the pain-processing".

In research done at Shriners by psychologists Hunter Hoffman and Walter Meyer, and similar work done by Dave Patterson at Harborview Burn Centre in Seattle, patients reported less discomfort.

Hoffman examined MRI scans of patients' brains, which showed they experienced less pain.

"I was very surprised. I didn't have the expectation of it working."

Proponents of VR are quick to point out it could have a big benefit over drugs, which can lead to tolerance and addiction. But VR's effectiveness still has to be proven, particularly when trying to combat chronic pain. Does the effect last when the headset comes off?

"We know relaxation techniques like hypnosis, yoga and meditation decrease perception of pain, so VR has promise, but it's too early for it to be standard care," said Houman Danesh, director of integrative pain management at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "It's a very young technology."