Billions of Americans suffer from chronic pain and the number of opioid prescription drugs in the country has tripled since the 1990s. Although the United States only accounts for 5% of the global population, the use of such painkillers has reached 80%. Obviously, we urgently need to find a substitute, such as virtual reality (VR). Howard Rose, an industry veteran, believes this should work. More than 20 years ago, he began his career in the VR industry at the HITLab at the University of Washington. The lab was founded by the United States Air Force veteran Tom Furness, who has experienced various VR elements in the military since the 1960s, such as treating phobias and teaching education.
HITLab Psychologist Hunter Hoffman created SnowWorld, an experiment designed to treat burn patients by immersing them in a virtual environment.
Burn patients need to undergo painful wound care procedures and are usually performed several times a day. Even the highest dose of painkillers can hardly suppress this pain.
In short, this world of ice and snow is used to transfer the patient's attention to pain. In this magical world, they can fly through a magical canyon while penguins and snowmen throw snowballs at you.
In the past decade, Dr. Hoffmann and his team have conducted several experiments (including experiments for veterans), showing that this technology is feasible.
Compared to subjects who did not play VR games (but passed music or other non-VR video games), patients immersed in virtual reality experienced half the pain.
Based on this, HITLab created a virtual reality startup named Firsthand Technology to develop disruptive new technologies to alleviate chronic pain, such as the new version of SnowWorld 2.0 that is currently being tested and adopts more modern VR technology.
Initial trials have already yielded good analgesic effects. In a small-scale clinical trial for 40 people (60 VR treatments per person), only one person did not reduce pain.
Overall, patients claim that they can reduce pain by 60 to 75% with VR. Asked immediately after receiving a VR treatment, the patient claimed to have a 30 to 50% reduction in pain. In contrast, the average analgesic effect of morphine was only 30%.
Quartz's report stated that other research institutions have come to similar conclusions, such as the Pain Research Laboratory at Simon Fraser University in Canada and the Virtual Reality Medical Center in San Diego, USA.
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