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....