There’s No Pain in “SnowWorld”

Pain is something we all experience. From stubbing your toe to emotional pain like loss. This review paper discusses stepping into a virtual reality (VR) world as a distraction to pain.

A review is a different kind of article from the article I summarized last post. That article was based on one research study, whereas a review paper summarizes the relevant research to date on a specific scientific topic. I will only cover one section of the review in this post and will likely return to other sections in future posts.

Imagine Yourself Floating Along

Maybe you’re on a tube in an empty lazy river, completely undisturbed. Maybe you’re just laying back in a river and moving with its flow. Take a minute to imagine yourself floating in complete calmness.

Do you feel more relaxed? Do you feel like you succeeded in distracting your mind for a few moments? Let’s return to that feeling soon.

What Are We Dealing With?

The section of the review paper I’m covering is the use of VR as an analgesic for burns. Severe burns are among the worst pains homo sapiens can experience. Burn patients report that treatment of burn wounds is almost as painful as the burns themselves. Treatment entails removing bandages, cutting away dead skin, applying antibiotics, and rebandaging daily (the process is called debridement).

The review paper discusses a novel method of alleviating a patient’s pain while treating their burn wounds. The chosen analgesic was a wintry VR world for the patients to immerse themselves in.

Welcome to SnowWorld

Go back to when you were floating along. Now imagine it a little more frozen and a lot snowier. Envision a snowman to your right hurling snowballs across the river. Imagine penguins frolicking about, doing their penguin thing. That’s the world the scientists put their patients in.

What Exactly Did the Scientists Do?

This wasn’t exactly a research study — the patients were studied in case studies (one-by-one). The scientists tested “SnowWorld” on 11 patients with burns that required care in a major burn center. The scientists identified the 6 most painful minutes of the debridement process for each patient. When the caretakers were performing the debridement process, the researchers immersed their patients in “SnowWorld” for 3 minutes and tested their patients as their own control subjects for the other 3 minutes. The patients were randomly assigned to VR-first or VR-last group for the 6 minutes of testing.

How Did the Patients Feel?

The patients reported “lower worst pain, pain unpleasantness and less time thinking about pain” during the immersion time vs the control time. The level of relief a patient felt coincided with their immersion level (how much they felt like they were) in SnowWorld. 11 patients are a small sample group, so statistically speaking only the few patients that experienced the greatest relief hold any statistical significance. But all 11 patients reported more relief with SnowWorld than with drugs alone,* so let’s not think about the statistics too much?

How This Isn’t Clickbait Science?

3 things.

1) Even though 11 is a very small number for scientific studies, these were case studies performed with specific burn patients. It’s just the start of our research.

2) Pain is a subjective experience of one’s consciousness. You and I will never experience pain the same way. One could argue that these 11 patients’ reported pain scores show nothing. Well their brain scans showed reduced activity in pain-related areas**. That sounds like pretty objective science.

3) As I said at the beginning, this is based on a review paper. This is our current understanding of the science of the application of VR for burn patients (and burn patients only). Hopefully we will learn more soon.

Why This Is Important?

Try and remember that the level of relief a patient felt depended on how immersed they felt in SnowWorld. Now, consider for a moment that every moment that you aren’t in absolute comfort, you are experiencing some sort of pain. Whatever it is that’s preventing you from experiencing complete relief is causing you pain. Now try and immerse yourself in that river scene a little more deeply. If you learn how to properly immerse yourself into that river of calmness, you too will feel more relief.

* You will not find a reference to drugs in section 3.5 of the review paper as you’d expect. For that, you can either go to the original study (which I cannot find a free link for unfortunately) or check out “Cure: A Journey Into The Science Of Mind Over Body” by Jo Marchant. That’s where I originally heard about SnowWorld.

** Above note applies to brain scans as well.