Instead of pills for your pain, your doctor may give you virtual reality goggles
When you think about virtual reality, you probably think about video games. It turns out that virtual reality is also making great headway in health tech. The healthcare users are finding lots of applications for virtual reality, and one of the biggest ones is actually being driven by the opioid epidemic. The problem with painkillers is people abuse them, and so physicians and other healthcare professionals are looking for ways to treat pain without using chemicals. And as it turns out, virtual reality is one of the most promising avenues for achieving this. It helps transport the patient to someplace else and they’re less aware of their pain. A recent experiment was done with women in childbirth to see if it could help them manage their pain. And the study at Cedars Sinai showed that women who were using virtual reality had a significant reduction in their pain and had lower heart rates than women who used other methods or didn’t have any other intervention.