Virtual reality is increasingly used as therapy to manipulate the brain. After phobias, TOCs, post-traumatic stress or stopping smoking, virtual reality is now tackling phantom pain. These pains can occur in people who have had an amputation or are paralyzed. They then feel pain coming from the limb which is no longer there or which no longer functions. This sensation is very real for the patient, but is nevertheless completely resistant to pharmacotherapy.
A team of researchers from the Polytechnic University of Lausanne, Switzerland, has just shown that this phantom pain can be reduced in paraplegics thanks to virtual reality. Their study is published in the journal Neurology.
The goal: to create a visual illusion
Scientists have worked with paraplegics who feel pain originating in their legs when nothing else can be felt beneath the spinal cord injury. Their device consists of a pair of fictitious legs, a camera and a virtual reality headset. The legs are filmed by the camera in real time and the image is relayed in the helmet worn by the patient. The subject then sees the mannequin’s legs from above, as if they were his own. With this setup, the scientist simultaneously pats the patient’s back and dummy legs.
“We managed to create an illusion: the illusion that the subject’s legs were lightly patted, when in fact the subject was patted on the back, above the spinal cord injury,” Olaf Blanke explains in a statement. , lead author of the study. “When we did this, the subjects also reported that their pain had decreased.” Although the patient is aware of being patted on the back, the illusion is created after a minute of visual and sensory stimulation. This is because the visual stimulus dominates over the tactile.
After such encouraging results, researchers are now developing a real immersive therapy with the aim of automating these visio-tactile stimulations in order to allow home use for all people suffering from phantom pain.
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