Virtual reality for persistent pain: a new direction for behavioral pain management.

Recent research indicates that immersive virtual reality (VR) can be used tool in treating acute pain [10,25,23]. For example, VR-based behavioral interventions have been used to decrease acute pain among individuals undergoing painful medical procedures (e.g. wound cleaning of burn injuries [14,15,22,10], urological endoscopies (36)), physical therapy (e.g. for blunt force trauma [16], for burned skin [12,13]), and dental pain [11,5], and experimental pain in healthy volunteers (e.g. thermal pain) [17,18]. Although these data suggest that VR has promise as a tool to help reduce acute pain, there has been limited investigation on the use of VR in the treatment of patients with persistent pain.