Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s best efforts, virtual reality has yet to really take off. But that doesn’t mean that VR isn’t useful. The technology has the potential to transform the way we treat mental health, fall in love, and even cope with death. As VR becomes more sophisticated and commonplace, we’ll begin to see more ways that it’s capable of improving our everyday lives—especially those of the most vulnerable among us.
That’s what researchers in the U.K. discovered in a comprehensive review published Monday in the journal BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care that found that immersive VR was able to help ease pain and anxiety in cancer patients. The technology also seems to have alleviating effects on patients with other debilitating, long-term issues such as dementia, multiple sclerosis, and kidney diseases—while offering a way of reducing the need for pharmaceuticals like opiates.
“VR offers a potential alternative to pharmaceutical interventions for managing pain and anxiety related to medical conditions,” lead author Martin Dempster, a professor at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told The Daily Beast in an email. “We are not suggesting that VR should completely replace pharmaceuticals but that it could perhaps reduce the need for these drugs, thereby avoiding problems arising from the interactions between different drugs.”
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The review looked at 31 studies published over a 30-year period on how VR could be used to treat pain in patients with cancer, dementia, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and multiple sclerosis. The patients were treated with a variety of VR intervention techniques, including video games as well as immersive and relaxing experiences. These experiences ranged from ocean exploration to the “world of art,” with even one set on the Titanic (though it’s unclear how relaxing that particular experience was).
Some of the studies incorporated mindfulness exercises like meditation while others required patients to leverage specific skills like gardening. “[The] therapeutic benefits of immersive VR interventions may be a result of patients with chronic disease experiencing a simulated natural environment with increased presence,” the authors wrote. “Access to nature has been shown to promote human health and adjustment reactions by mitigating adverse environmental stressors.”
Overall, the authors found that the VR intervention helped alleviate patients’ pain and even increased their happiness. One study determined that relaxing virtual environments “significantly reduces pain and fatigue, while improving subjective anxiety and depression among inpatients with cancer,” while another found that they alleviated anxiety, depression, stress, and pain amongst patients with heart conditions.
The study’s authors note that it’s still unclear what exactly is causing patient pain to be relieved, but it’s likely due to the fact that the VR experiences are distracting from the pain, allowing the patient to better cope with their conditions.
“We are not sure why this is happening but there are some theories about this which focus on the possibility that VR involves attentional and emotional resources that are, therefore, distracted from the experience of pain,” Dempster explained. “For example, we know that VR activates regions such as the orbitofrontal, dorsolateral and limbic neural networks, which are also involved in the experience of pain.”
He adds that future research is needed to understand the full effect of VR intervention techniques and how they can be employed on a larger scale. For now, though, this is yet another great case for the still- emerging technology. If nothing else, if the future of VR isn’t going to be in the metaverse, at least it can do some good in real-life hospital rooms.
