Pain management
and virtual reality
Pain, despite being an unpleasant sensation, is a vital alarm system of the body since it allows the individual to recognize some stimulus harmful to the body tissue. Acute pain, because of its short duration, ends once the cause is resolved. However, chronic pain loses the alarm function to become an obstacle to achieve quality life. This pain can be caused by various conditions, and is resistant to standard treatments (Kato, J., Agalave, N. M., and Svensson, C.I., 2016). Some of the causes are burns, cancer, fibromyalgia, among others.
In relation to anxiety, it is a normal reaction to stress. It serves to help a person with a difficult situation and to enable them to deal with it. This type of anxiety is adaptive, but when it becomes excessive it can manifest itself as an anxiety disorder.
Pain Management therapeutic area includes different VR environments for patients with chronic pain, acute pain, or anxiety for medical procedures, who have to undergo processes such as hemodialysis, endoscopies, chemotherapy, visits to the dentist, magnetic resonance, etc., in order to decrease the painful sensations or anxiety by focusing the attention on the virtual environment.
There is scientific evidence that when one shifts attention from a noxious stimulus to a more pleasant one, there is a reduction in the perception and experience of pain. Melzack and Wall proposed the gate control theory, which emphasizes the relationship between the central and peripheral nervous systems, according to which only certain painful stimuli would pass to the brain. According to this theory, several Central Nervous System activities, especially attention, emotion and memories related to previous experience, play a fundamental role in sensory perception (Gold, et al, 2005). Empirical evidence indicates that the use of virtual reality allows, in case of achieving a high immersion in the scene, the distraction of painful and anxious sensations in a very effective way (Jones, T., et al, 2016).