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Treatment, training and therapy: VR in healthcare

doctors healthcare

For many, virtual reality conjures images of gaming and entertainment, but it’s also making waves in healthcare.

Sergeant Jon Warren is standing in an Iraqi street market when a car suddenly explodes about one hundred feet ahead of him, and panic ensues. Later, he sits in an armoured vehicle on a long desert road while distant enemies bombard him with gunfire.

His experience is entirely virtual, of course – Warren is in fact sitting safely inside the University of Southern California, using a Virtual Reality (VR) headset. He is repeatedly re-living the moment in 2010 when, during his tour of Iraq with the US army, his squad was hit by a roadside bomb which left him seriously injured and psychologically traumatised. VR exposure treatment, which aims to reduce the fear of traumatic memories by allowing patients to re-live them again and again, is now widely used in the US to treat soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), said Albert ‘Skip’ Rizzo, the award-winning clinical psychologist who pioneered the treatment several years ago....