Bianca Bartz
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Are you ready to let go of your fear of spiders? What about the angst of flying? Virtual reality therapy can erase your fear. Instead of laying back on a couch and recounting your fears to a shrink, this new form of therapy let’s the patient enter a computer-generated world while their physical reactions are monitored. Exposed directly to the situations they fear, the patient gets to maneuver around a simulated scenario that would, in real life, cause them to wet their pants in terror. It’s even been used on those scarred by the September 11 events and has been proven quite effective. The scenarios are so real that they actually evoke the same feelings of panic, right down to excessive perspiration, sweaty palms and a racing heart. The intention is to keep bringing the patient into the scenario until they realize that the pain they used to associate with the experience no longer accompanies it, thus reconditioning the patient. Don’t know what they can do for those who suffer from sexual performance anxiety. One can only imagine… Check out the schizophrenia simulator mentioned on Trend Hunter a few months ago:
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Schizophrenia Simulations - Officers Trained With Virtual Hallucinations
This cardinal virtue of virtual reality--the ability to give users the sense that they are "somewhere else"--can be of great value in a medical setting. Researchers are finding that some of the best applications of the software focus on therapy rather than entertainment. In essence, virtual reality can ease pain, both physical and psychological.
For the past several years, I have worked with David R. Patterson, a pain expert at the University of Washington School of Medicine, to determine whether severely burned patients, who often face unbearable pain, can relieve their discomfort by engaging in a virtual-reality program during wound treatment. The results have been so promising that a few hospitals are now preparing to explore the use of virtual reality as a tool for pain control. In other projects, my colleagues and I are using virtual-reality applications to help phobic patients overcome their irrational fear of spiders and to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in survivors of terrorist attacks.
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