During surgery, in addition to anesthesia, people are given sedatives to relieve emotional stress. According to Belgian scientists from the Erasmus Hospital of Rotterdam, to calm patients down, you can just as well use virtual reality, which seems to hypnotize a person and give calmness. They proved the veracity of their theory in an experiment, the results of which were shared at the congress of the European Society of Anesthesiology Euroanaesthesia.
The experiment involved 60 patients who required orthopedic surgery on the shoulder, wrist, or knee, all using anesthetics and sedatives. They were divided into groups of 20 people: the first group received anesthesia and sedatives, and the second received anesthesia and part of virtual hypnosis. The third group, from which the greatest result was expected, received anesthesia and was in virtual reality during the operation.
What is virtual hypnosis?
The essence of virtual hypnosis was that patients were shown footage from the life of underwater animals. They were also wearing headphones, in which the announcer read the text in a soothing voice. It was expected that, despite this, patients would be able to completely distract from the operation and not worry about possible pain. When pain occurred, they had the right to say so - they were immediately sedated.
As expected, the third group received the maximum effect from virtual hypnosis - 90% of patients lay quietly on the operating table without requiring sedatives. The second group, who watched only a portion of the soothing film, also got through the surgery easily, but some people later felt anxious.
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Virtual reality in medicine
According to researcher Dolphin Van Hecke, virtual hypnosis is easy to use and very popular with patients. They do not yet know how it reduces pain, but most likely, patients simply shift their focus from surgery to film. In the future, virtual reality may start to be used as a curative therapy for people with chronic pain.
Ramis Ganiev