Virtual Reality and Medicinal Qualities

I used to want to be a doctor. I wanted to help people and make them better. Now a video game can assist doctors with that very thing. Without going through 12 plus years of schooling, crying, and all nighters. There currently are VR programs that are able to help people with a variety of diseases or ailments and it blows my mind.

There are now opportunities that have been opened up because of Virtual Reality. For one instance, surgeons can use a VR Camera to record a surgery and people around the world can watch with a headset. This gives students a chance to watch a surgery and learn how to do operations. There are only so many spots available for a student to shadow an actual surgery. But with a video recording, hundreds of people can watch the surgery and learn the techniques.

Another way that virtual reality is helping the medical community is providing therapy for stroke patients to help speed up their recovery and motor movements. This is able to happen because there is a program called MindMotionPro that allows patients to pretend or practice lifting their arms and move their digits. They do not actually carry out the movement, instead the program helps them to enhance the attention and engagement. It is suppose to make the repetitive recovery movements more fun and to help the nervous system recover faster because the patient is not just laying in bed doing nothing.

VR can help relax patients with chronic illnesses. For some patients the four walls that they are enclosed in just add to the pain and stress. VR googles can help patients leave the room by taking them on adventures through the ocean or safari or where ever they want. Being able to relax this way can help patients with their stress. I personally know that stress affects my body and how it functions, particularly my blood sugars. Not that I go to the hospital all the time for long periods of times, but the longest I was there was five days and I was bored out of my mind. I was too weak to walk around for a while so I just laid in my bed waiting for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Just one use of VR goggles like this would have improved my mood immensely.

Giving younger doctors an exerience of an elderly man to create more emphathy and undrstanding is available through VR. The program for this is called “We Are Alfred” and it allows people to hypothetically be an elderly man wiht video and audio impairments. The goal for this is to close the disconnection between the younger doctors and older patients. This is believed to be able to happen when the physicians can see things through the patients’ eyes.

All of these programs and opportunities that VR has opened are crazy advanced and 3 years ago (when I would have started my pre med programs) they were not available. They are making life easier and more fun and I am here for it.