Massively^™

The last thing Merck or Pfizer want to hear is that their drugs aren't needed anymore. According to Diane Gromala, a Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) professor, that may just be the case. She bases her belief on the many experiments that consistently show people who suffer serious, chronic pain (which Gromala suffers from herself) often find more relief in virtual reality environments than drug-based treatments.

According to a CanWest News Service article, Gromala is currently working with doctors to learn why subjects who are distracted in virtual reality worlds report less pain than those using drug-based pain therapy. She believes that controlling pain through computerized VR and biofeedback mediation gives people ways to express, control, and keep track of their pain that pills can't. Video games have been shown to help patients in drug addiction therapy, why not pain management as well?

If her studies pan out to be true (we first learned about this story from the folks at FileFront) , it will most certainly help vidicate an industry that has otherwise been villified for everything from mass school shootings to creating a generation of slackers. A little bit of good PR for video games would be a nice change of pace.

One of the few things I recall from my Psych 101 class back in college was the tale of Pavlov and his dogs. As it turns out you can teach yourself to associate sounds with actions. A new virtual reality therapy is doing just that, helping those with addictions connect things they hear in game with the will to resist temptation.

The game, created at Duke University by Professor Zach Rosenthal, works with rehabilitation patients to try to control their cravings when they are not in therapy. Because the patient is immersed in an environment similar to that they would find in the outside world, the temptations are fairly convincing. Rosenthal explains that cravings are a learned mental behavior, and if you can associate something, say a particular tone (like Pavlov's bell) with resisting that craving, you create a new learned behavior, this time a positive one. I love it when I see positive uses for video games. It proves that we as a society can learn so much from the games we play.