Just what the doctor ordered…

How virtual reality is changing medicine.

Imagine there was a game that could melt away a burn victim’s pain by whisking them off to the snowy peak of a mountain. Or a programme that could make amputees think their limb had been restored, reducing phantom pains.

Imagine there was a system that could could detect Alzheimer’s disease years before you develop tell-tale symptoms. Sounds like something out of sci-fi film, doesn’t it? Far from it – these are some of the results of the use of virtual reality that is revolutionising healthcare. 

The use of VR in medicine is nothing new; researchers began developing software in the 90s that would create 3D models of patients organs. The idea was there, but the tech – and the simulations – were underdeveloped and time consuming to make, a clumsy early take on what VR is today.

Increasingly sophisticated technology has allowed more realistic imagery, and patients are now donning VR headsets in order to transport them into different worlds, far away from the one in which they, and their maladies, inhabit.

This has been a game-changer in pain relief, none more so than for burn patients, for who every day – from burn cleaning and bandaging to skin grafts – is a battle with intense discomfort. Dr Hunter Hoffman, a University of Washington scientist with expertise in the use of VR for pain relief, states that severe burn victims go through “some of the most painful procedures in medicine,” for which, “pain medications help, but they’re often not strong enough.”

His solution, Snow World, requires no medication, just the VR headset and the patient’s full attention. Burn victims are transported to an icy tundra, filled with cooling blues and whites, where their sole challenge is to throw snowballs at penguins. As trivial as this sounds, Snow World melts away the pain for burn victims, with patients reporting a reduction of pain by up to 50% compared to those that do not play the game. 

“What we’re doing is making people less conscious using electronics; they’re less in the real world. You’re basically in a tug-of-war between the VR and the pain where the patient is doing the duel.”

Dr Hunter Hoffman

Part of VR’s success is its ability to trick the brain into believing that what it sees is not a simulation but a reality. This has been found to be particularly helpful for amputees suffering from phantom pains.

Bo Geng, Postdoc at the Faculty of Medicine at Aalborg University in Denmark, explains that, “even though a person who has had a hand amputated can no longer see it, in many cases he or she can still feel it. This sensory conflict may be interpreted by the brain as pain.”

In the past, doctors have found that by placing a mirror at an angle, they were able to create the visual illusion that the body was symmetrical and in doing so, trick the brain into thinking the missing limb was in fact still present. But the illusion is easily shattered, and this is where VR has stepped in.

“With Virtual Reality there is a much better chance of creating a convincing alternative reality.”

Bo Geng, Postdoc at the Faculty of Medicine at Aalborg University in Denmark,

It does so by placing the patient into a three-dimensional world where they use their limbs to perform tasks. This, paired with electrical impulses to the patients’ ‘stump’ are enough to convince the brain the amputated limb is still present and ease phantom pains. 

Virtual reality is not only helping patients to manage their ailments, but is also being used by doctors as a tool for diagnosis, particularly in the field of mental illness. Its strength lies in simulating convincing real life situations that would otherwise be impossible to mimic in a doctor’s office, and it is often these situations that trigger symptoms in the patient,.

“VR provides a unique opportunity to bring real-life experiences into the clinician’s office,” explains Dr. Martine van Bennekom, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam.

“With some psychiatric disorders, for example OCD or panic disorder, patients usually experience their symptoms in their personal environment or in crowded places, and not in the clinician’s room. With VR it is possible to immerse patients in an exterior environment while the clinician can observe symptoms and interview the patients about these symptoms and underlying thoughts.”

Dr. Martine van Bennekom

A recent breakthrough found that virtual reality could be used to flag patients who may develop Alzheimers disease, years before the onset of symptoms. Although memory is commonly considered to be the first thing affected by the disease, difficulty navigating is increasingly recognised to predate other symptoms. This is where VR comes into play.

Participants don a VR headset, and undergo a navigation test that uses the entorhinal cortex, the ‘sat nav’ of the brain that is impeded early on by Alzheimer’s, making it far more efficient than gold-standard tests at pinpointing early onset. In doing so, the hope is that researchers will be able to develop long term treatments aiming to slow down the condition rather than treating it once it has developed.

The medical world is constantly changing, and improving, and as VR gets cheaper, and the technology behind it marches on, much of future change in medicine and healthcare will be as a result of virtual reality. From surgery to diagnosis, pain relief to training, VR is increasingly infiltrating hospitals, clinics and medical schools. Perhaps one day, the saying will go, “Some VR a day to keep the doctor away.”