The Sunday Read: ‘Can Virtual Reality Help Ease Chronic Pain?’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chronic pain is one of the leading causes of long-term disability in the world. By some measures, 50 million Americans live with chronic pain, in part because the power of medicine to relieve it remains inadequate. Helen Ouyang, a physician and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, explores the potentially groundbreaking use of virtual reality in the alleviation of acute pain, as well as anxiety and depression, and meets the doctors and entrepreneurs who believe this “nonpharmacological therapy” is a good alternative to prescription drugs. A lush forest, a snow-capped mountain, a desert at sunset — could these virtual experiences really be the answer for managing chronic pain?

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0:00.0	The Daily is sponsored by Oliver Twist, the new audible original.
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0:32.0	My name is Helen O'Ying.
0:33.6	I'm an emergency room doctor in New York City and I've been fascinated by chronic pain
0:37.9	for a long time.
0:39.7	When we touch a hot stove, we feel pain and pull our hand away.
0:44.9	This is our body's alarm system.
0:47.6	But chronic pain is when the whole alarm system goes haywire.
0:51.0	The body is just in a state of alarm all the time and we don't have any good treatments
0:56.4	for that.
0:57.4	There's one incident that really sticks with me.
1:01.2	A man had driven to five different emergency rooms looking for his missing son and it turned
1:06.3	out actually that the son had died in our ER just about an hour earlier.
1:12.0	The father explained how his son had undergone foot surgery and was prescribed per cassette.
1:17.2	He got hooked and went on to use other drugs like heroin, which is what ultimately killed
1:21.7	him.
	...

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