When someone gets stuck in the food and walks to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, the staff will always call a doctor like Brennan Spiegel as a gastroenterologist and take it out of the patient. Food plots are his professional skills. But one day, when he got a call, he learned that a patient thought he had something stuck in his throat and was ready for surgery. Then he discovered that the patient had beaten his chest with his fist, when Spiegel realized that "he did not feel suffocated. It was just a panic attack."
So instead of using a stretcher or a wheelchair, Spiegel took out a pair of VR glasses for the patient. The glasses immediately showed off the Hawaiian beach scene. Within seconds, the patient stopped struggling. After a few minutes he was completely quiet, and even pushing did not wake up. Spiegel hurriedly took down the VR glasses on the patient's head, when the patient shed tears and said: "I have been thinking about my entire life, and even feel out of control."
After a while, the patient was transferred to the psychiatric department for further treatment. There was never any food in his throat. The brain deceived him. Fortunately VR can fool his brain.
More and more hospitals like Cedars-Sinai are trying to apply VR technology to their daily visits. Spiegel is one of the researchers. He has conducted several VR clinical trials in the past few years. The end result shows a pair of VR glasses. It can reduce pain by a quarter, whether it is joint damage or cancer.
Now, he has concentrated his energy on the treatment of chronic pain - it is reported that more than 25 million people in the United States are afflicted with this disease each year. Usually, addictive painkillers are the only treatment options that patients can choose, but analgesics kill an average of nearly 100 people a day, so doctors are looking for alternatives to this type of drug, and virtual reality may be fast It will become one of them.
For more than 20 years, scientists have been exploring the possibility of VR technology to alleviate physiological pain. As pioneer of virtual reality therapy, Dr. Hunter Hoffman of the University of Washington launched this type of research as early as the beginning of the 21st century, but given the limitations of technology at the time. He had to use a VR head up to 8 pounds to connect to a small refrigerator-sized computer.
At that time, the equipment was worth as much as $90,000 and the burn patient could be sent to a cool blue and white 3D video game called "SnowWorld". Hoffman explained: "Usually, Burn patients usually experience painful wound care, but when immersed in the "Snow and Snow World" game, the patients feel that the feedback is less than half the true experience in the hospital ward, and more importantly in the right. When the patient's feet underwent a hot thorn test, they also did not feel any pain."
Hoffman said: "VR technology is the perfect partner to relieve acute pain, only 20 minutes of pain can effectively reduce, but chronic pain is completely different and more challenging. However, VR technology has the potential to improve the effective treatment in the future, If you let the patient go home to 'meditation', then there are certainly not many patients who can persist, but if you give them a VR device to help them into the ancient world of the VR world and meditate with the monks, they are more It is possible to insist on doing so.†VR technology is only a transmission medium. The most important thing is that the patient can use it to see and experience the content in another world.
Now as the cost of VR technology has fallen, more companies have begun to invest in this technology. It is located on the Avenue of Stars in Beverly Hills, and AppliedVR is only 15 minutes away from Cedars-Sinai. They are currently building a series of 3D content that can relieve pain, just like the VR version of Netflix.
Josh Sackman, the team’s chairman, said: “We are trying to build a series of experience content for the patients based on their needs and interests, but in the end we hope people can use this technology to teach their skills rather than rely on it.†At present, his team has designed up to 24 experiences that can be divided into four categories: distraction, relaxation, evasion, and education.
The first experience they produced was called "Bear Blast," which has a cartoon-like castle landscape. Users can use a cannon to target the red teddy bears around them. The more scores they score, the more they score. Dr. Spiegel uses this game for patients. Theoretically, "Bear Blast" can distract the patient's brain and shut down the pain signals transmitted in the peripheral nervous system. The more immersed in it, the less pain there is.
Of course, the whole game has experienced numerous failures and repeated tests during the design process. AppLiedVR initially designed the game scene as a candy-colored Disneyland where users can knock everything around. Developers soon discovered that such a game is too casual, and the experiencer needs more guidance. This is where he now has "Bear Blast." This is very effective in reducing acute pain and can also provide more lasting results for the patient.
In a recent clinical trial at Cedars Hospital, Spiedel prepared more different experiences for his patients to choose from, such as swimming with dolphins, taking a helicopter ride through the Strait of Iceland, or just sitting on a Hawaiian beach and thinking about life, etc. Waiting for a sound at the same time in the ear can tell the patient how to maintain a uniform breath, or guide you to think about the people and things that bring you happiness. Mindfulness, meditation, and cognitive behavior are a mature system of analgesia, but most doctors do not usually tell patients because they fear that the patient will not buy it for pills.
“We all know that positive thoughts can actually work on subtle body structures and prevent even more subtle pain signals from reaching the brain. We can't suppress people's nerves, let alone cancel the entire signal transmission process, but we can By reducing the intensity of these signals, positive thinking people can better withstand the ups and downs of daily life,†said William Clark Becker, a physician at the Yale University School of Medicine. Although he has not had a VR test manager, he is Experts in pain management and addiction problems.
Through past research, he found that patients responded well to mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy. It is also a very interesting idea to perform these treatments in VR, but it is important whether there are examples to prove that this really works.
Spiegel is currently working with a large insurance company to assess whether VR technology can really reduce the amount of painkillers used by injured patients.
He hopes that in the future, when people walk out of the operating room or recover from an accident, they are holding a set of VR glasses instead of a painkiller prescription. As Trump had said when he announced the pain medication crisis, “If we let people get settled before all this, they don't have to go through these problems.†It's easy to say, but VR technology may be It will make everything easier.
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