Video Game Therapy

In pain? Skip the morphine, and try a video game.

Helen Bradham, 79 left, gives Cecil Canavan, 84 moral support while he tackles the Nintendo Wii video bowling game at the Millennium Trail Manor retirement home, in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

A Simon Fraser University professor is trying to understand why experiments consistently show people who suffer serious pain often find more relief in virtual reality environments than drug-based treatments.

“There is a real demand for this kind of therapy,” said Diane Gromala, founding director of SFU’s BioMedia lab. “As Canada’s baby-boomers enter old age, pain management looms as a huge public-health issue.”

Gromala, who suffers from chronic pain herself, is working with doctors to learn how virtual reality therapies can give people ways to express and keep track of their pain. The therapies also can give them a way to gain some control over their suffering while waiting for treatment by specialists, she said.

 

Controlled experiments consistently show subjects who are distracted in a fully-immersive virtual reality world, such as a three-dimensional skiing adventure computer game, report less pain than their counterparts using drug-based pain therapy.

One of Gromala’s goals is to find new ways to use computer technology to help people improve their health through education, experience, and physical expressiveness.

About one in five Canadians experiences chronic pain. Some must wait an average of two to five years to see a specialist.

“Controlling pain through computerized VR and biofeedback meditation therapies has the promise of providing successful, cost-effective alternatives to pain medications,” she said.