Virtual Therapeutics: When Virtual Reality met Healthcare
Ever wondered if therapist-prescribed virtual beach vacation could ease away your worries better than double drug dosages at home? Psychiatrists could treat social phobia by inviting patients to virtual dinner parties? Pediatric hospitals could immerse children in fantasy Disneyland while they received frightening medical tests?
As a graduate student in the Human Computer Interaction major, I will be working on a final year capstone project, wherein I will be exploring the domain of VR and its benefits in Healthcare. This article aims to give you a basic understanding of how technology in the form of Virtual Headsets like Oculus Quest 2 are helping treat invisible wounds like trauma and pain management.
I. How traumatic is trauma?
As per the American Psychological Association, trauma is an emotional response to an unfortunate event that has happened in one’s life. It is very personal to everyone and the pain we experience is our own, be it a breakup, death of a loved one, survivor of a natural disaster/accident, childhood trauma or living with a chronic disease. If we go by some solid statistics,
- About 8 million adults in the U.S. have PTSD during a given year. (U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, 2019)
- 70% of adults in the U.S. experience atleast 1 traumatic event in their lifetime. (Singlecare, 2022)
- The amount of mild, moderate, and severe cases are nearly equal, with 36.6% of cases being severe, 33.1% being moderate, and 30.2% being mild. (Harvard Medical School, 2007)
- PTSD affects more than twice as many women (10%) as men (4%). (U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, 2019)
Moreover all the mental trauma can even lead to a conversion disorder, which is a condition wherein mental or emotional stresses are converted into physical symptoms.
II. Prepping on a Headset before Popping a Pill?
As a part of my first learning activity for this capstone project, I read a book which had caught my eye with its promising title-VRX: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine. Written by the Professor of Medicine and Public Health, Dr. Brennan Spiegel talks about the potential of virtual medicine and how it can be help in reducing the intake of addictive medicines or need for intrusive surgeries, if not completely replace them.
No longer at a niche stage, virtual medicine has now been proven to be effective in clinical situations like burn injuries to stroke and even PTSD. It It can train people to become more effective at managing their body like managing their pain through CBT breathing techniques.
Brennan even goes on to show how a basic VR headset lets a dementia patients regain function in a life-size virtual town, lets a patient with schizophrenia confront the demon within, and how simulations of the patients’ experiences make even doctors more empathic and sensitized to their problems.
In fact he has already deployed VR to over 3000 patients at the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California as a part of patient care and research projects.
III. Why make a person revisit bad memories?
Trauma is actually a way of your body trying to adapt to the terrible situation, in order to protect you from future experiences. But the issue is that the traumatized person does “maladaptation” of bad memories and cannot completely detach themselves from their bad memories. So they still have residues of fresh emotions when they remember them and it hurts every time.
Thus, you keep on reliving the unfortunate moment as the trauma affects parts of your brain like the forebrain (controls cognitive), limbic system (controls emotional), and hindbrain (controls somatic) which help archive your memories.
The idea is that pain is not only a physical experience numbed by medicines, but also an emotional, cognitive and social experience. Methods like Narrative Exposure Therapy come to the rescue here, wherein patients are nudged to tell their story in their own words, so that you can become separated from your problem it will only remain a memory before the brain archives it.
Take for example, a trauma survivor might be asked to remember the moment of their trauma when they believed ‘I’m going to die’ and would be asked ‘What do you know now?,’ thus making the patient come to the conclusion, ‘I survived’.
When you are desentisized from your memory, you can then tell your story in an alternative, self-compassionate way which helps reinforce positive feelings and reactions, and how you can overcome it eventually and move on. This technique is also called ‘re-storying’ or ‘re-authoring’.
At present, AI can help simplify the animation of characters in VR i.e you can act out your story without the complexity of learning animations. You just need to wear some sensor detection devices that allow VR to detect your movements and animate the character of your choice, just like controlling a game character with your body.
VR can make storytelling more immersive for trauma patients as they get to watch a video of their own story, framed in their own words.
References:
- Dr. Spiegel Interviewed on Onalytica: Interview with Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS | MyGiHealth. (2017, August 17). Retrieved September 25, 2022, from https://mygi.health/blog/news-updates/interview-with-brennan-spiegel-md-mshs
- Claudia M. Fletcher, G. B. (2018). More to the Story: Synthesizing Narrative Therapy with the Adaptive Information Processing Model. Journal of Counselor Practice, 9(2), 53–76. doi:DOI: 10.22229/ cmf902110
- Mark B. Powers, P. M. (2008). Virtual reality exposure therapy for anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 561–569. doi:doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2007.04.006
- Shilling, A. (2017). Clinical Virtual Reality tools to advance the prevention, assessment, and treatment of PTSD. Eur J Psychotraumatol. doi: doi: 10.1080/20008198.2017.1414560
- Team, S. (2022, February 16). PTSD statistics 2022. The Checkup. Retrieved September 25, 2022, from https://www.singlecare.com/blog/news/ptsd-statistics/
- NCBI — PTSD VR Diagnostic. (n.d.). Retrieved September 25, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374734/
