This episode of PEDAcast is brought to you by the Center for Injury Research and Policy

and the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Hello, everyone and welcome, once again to PDACast.

It is a pediatric podcast for moms and dads.

This is Dr. Mike coming to you from the campus of Nationwide Children's Hospital.

We're in Columbus, Ohio.

It's episode 563.

We're calling this one using virtual reality to manage pediatric pain. I want to welcome all of you to the program. So today we are examining pain management in kids with a particular focus on children undergoing long painful procedures, such as daily burn dressing changes in hospitalized patients, and then also when they go home.

Now, as most of you know, we are trying to cut down on the use of opioids for pain management in children and adults.

Of course, there's a time and a place for opioid use, initial management of pain associated with broken bones and large burns, for example.

But we like to avoid using opioids over a long period of time because of the need for higher doses as time goes by and dependence issues, also side effects that opioids have. And we all know that this has really been an

enormous problem in the United States. Now, we have talked about management for chronic pain

many times on this program and most recently in our CME podcast, which was chronic pain in

children and teenagers. That was episode 98.

And I'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can find it easily.

That was one of our continuing medical education podcasts for health care providers in chronic pain in children and teenagers. But what about recurrent episodes of severe pain such as the need for daily dressing changes of large burns.

Well, a physician at Nationwide Children's Hospital has developed a novel approach to pain

management in these kids, and I think it's an approach that will find many, many more uses

moving forward in the treatment of pain for children and teenagers and probably adults as well.

This novel approach involves playing virtual reality games, and there is science behind this approach,

which means we have evidence that it really does work.

The therapy is called VRPAT, and you're going to hear that quite a few times in this podcast, VRPAT.

That stands for virtual reality pain alleviation therapy.

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