Source: reddit
Virtual Reality Isn’t Just For Gamers Anymore; It Will Change Your Health
I’ve got one big idea that can change your health. But first some history.
When I was training to be a heart transplant surgeon at Stanford, at every opportunity I would go to the operating room to observe and study my mentor (and the “father of heart transplantation”) Dr.
Norm Shumway masterfully cut out a fatally diseased heart and replace it with a strong healthy one, always amazed at that miraculous moment when it sprung back to life. Observing these rare operations was invaluable to me as a trainee, but nothing compared to that first experience of actually holding the scalpel in my own hand, making the initial, fateful incision, and deciding precisely where to place each stitch. Over time, I created the muscle memory that would allow me to safely perform heart transplants well over a hundred times in the years ahead.It was the timeworn, slightly hyperbolic, surgical mantra, “See one, do one, teach one.” It was the best we had at the time. But is that really the best, or safest, way to learn? Or do patients deserve more?
Experience matters. Things we actually experience stay with us in a way that things we are simply told, taught, or observe do not. Today, we have myriad different mediums for teaching—images, videos, tablets—but until recently none that our brain cognitively believed to be actually happening to us. We could differentiate “real” from “virtual.” But the latest advances in virtual reality are radically changing that. The technological gap between virtual and real is rapidly diminishing.
As virtual reality (VR) software becomes more sophisticated, users are able to interact with the environment through multiple senses. Our brains and bodies begin to experience the virtual environment as real.
VR is no longer just a source of gaming entertainment. Over the past 12 months, astounding technological advances coupled with seismic shifts in our healthcare sector toward “value-based care” (wherein quality, safety, and outcome are primary determinants) are opening the door to its effective clinical use. The immersive technology is being studied as a treatment modality for a broad swath of health-related issues, including: to lessen acute pain; to treat psychiatric conditions such as phobias, anxiety disorders and addictions; to provide cognitive training and improve limb function in those with neurological disorders; and to assist with and accelerate physical rehabilitation. In addition, it holds particular promise for accelerating medical education (like how quickly and safely a surgical trainee like me can learn to do transplants), modifying an unhealthy behavior such as smoking, personalizing therapies to the individual, and improving compliance to prescribed treatment regimens.
A useful framework for understanding the application of VR in medicine and health has been proposed by one of the field’s leaders, Albert “Skip” Rizzo, PhD, of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Dr. Rizzo organizes applications into broad categories based on the underlying effects, which include:
Furthermore, the immersive virtual reality experience improves retention. A University of Maryland study released this June found that individuals had an 8.8% improvement overall in recall accuracy using a VR headset compared to more traditional two-dimensional platforms like a desktop computer or tablet.
In some hospitals and universities, virtual reality, as well as its close cousin augmented reality (picture a variation of Google Glass), are already making a difference. Leading healthcare organizations including Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Inova Health, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital and Duke University Medical Center have all actively put them to use. At Duke, women…
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