If you live with chronic pain, you know it can affect more than just your body. It can impact your ability to move, sleep, work, socialise, and enjoy life the way you want to. Over time, pain can become something you continue to experience, even after an injury has healed. New tools, like Virtual Reality (VR), are showing exciting potential to help manage this.
First, What Is Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain is pain that lasts for more than three months. The nervous system becomes overprotective and is more sensitive, meaning movements or sensations feel more painful than they should. This is sometimes called “pain sensitisation.”
Chronic pain is real, and in no way is made up or “all in your head.” It’s driven by changes in how the brain responds to ‘danger signals’ from your nerves. The good news is that it’s possible to change how the brain responds to those signals for the better, to reduce chronic pain.
What Is Virtual Reality (VR) and How Can It Help?
A Virtual Reality (VR) headset gives you a 360° view of a virtual environment. You can look anywhere in the virtual space – up, down, left, right, or behind – and you can hear sounds from speakers in the headset so it feels like you’re actually in the place that’s shown to you. In healthcare, VR is now being used to help people manage chronic pain – here are a few ways how:
1. It Helps Reduce Fear of Movement
When you’ve had pain for a long time, it’s normal to become fearful of certain movements, even those that are safe and would not cause you harm. This fear can increase your pain and by avoiding movement, can lead to further muscle weakness. VR allows you to reintroduce gentle movement in a way that feels safe and often even fun. This can help build confidence, improve movement tolerance, and reduce the “threat” your brain feels.
2. It Assists in Providing Pain Education
Having a greater understanding of pain empowers individuals and leads to better pain outcomes. VR programs build for pain management can help to deliver important pain education, that supports education provided by the practitioner. We all learn differently, and VR is a tool that can provide a visual learning option that may not have been explored in an individual’s treatment yet. It also helps to revise important education points in the months or years following treatment, for continued benefit in an engaging way.
3. It Distracts the Brain from Pain
VR can help “take the brain somewhere else.” When you’re focused on what you see and do in the virtual environment, the brain has less attention available to focus on pain. This is similar to how a nurse might ask you what you had for lunch as they use a needle on you.
4. It Changes the Way the Brain Processes Pain
Pain is an emotional and cognitive experience as much as it is physical. VR can help retrain how the brain interprets signals from the body. For example, moving without pain in a virtual environment sends new messages to the brain: “This is safe,” or “I can do this.” Over time, this can help break the pain cycle.
Is VR a Cure for Chronic Pain?
VR isn’t a cure for chronic pain, and it’s not suitable for everyone, nor suitable as a treatment alone. It’s a tool that can be used alongside other treatments like exercise, education, medication, and psychological treatment, which together support better outcomes. For many people, it’s a helpful way to safely explore movement and feel more in control of their pain.
Final Thoughts
In chronic pain management, it’s important to consider the numerous factors that contribute to pain that are not necessarily the ‘injury’ itself. Chronic pain management often involves education and is aimed at creating change in the nervous system to reduce sensitivity and foster safety. Virtual Reality is one of the newer and exciting tools that are helping deliver this treatment.
