Whether it’s a throbbing toothache after root canal treatment or a sore throat when you have a cold: Some pains are persistent and sometimes hardly go away, even with pills. But there’s a trick that many probably figured out when they were kids: distraction. If we distract ourselves with TV series, crossword puzzles, podcasts, etc., this often significantly reduces our perception of pain. Video games play a special role in this.
Video games are more distracting than television
An experiment by Eleanor Jameson and her colleagues from the Dunedin School of Medicine in New Zealand shows that video games are ideal for distracting pain. They asked 60 participants to dip their hand in two-degree cold water for as long as they could stand. Once without any distraction, once with active distraction in the form of a game that can be played with one hand on the Nintendo Wii and once with television as a passive distraction.
The result: “The participants had more joy, less fear and a greater reduction in pain with active distraction than with passive distraction,” the scientists report. This effect can probably be explained by the fact that actively playing a video game requires more attention than passively watching a series. “The more attention is paid to the distraction, the less time there is for pain perception, which could lead to greater pain reduction,” explain Mona Sajeev from the School of Women’s and Children’s Health in Sydney and her team.
A joystick against the Piecks
The pain-relieving effect of video games can be observed in many different situations. As far as children are concerned, evidence to date has shown that many medical procedures, including surgical and dental procedures, vaccinations, blood tests and wound care, are less painful if they are allowed to play video games.
For example, a study of children between the ages of three and six found that nearly 80 percent of those allowed to play during blood draws experienced little pain. Of those children who were not allowed to distract themselves with video games, seven out of ten said they felt severe pain.
Gaming as a painkiller substitute
However, video games unfold their full potential not only in the area of minor, short-term pain, such as that caused by a flu vaccination. Even people with extreme pain benefit from gaming. This applies, for example, to children with cancer who suffer from mucositis. This inflammation of the mucous membranes is a common side effect of chemotherapy and sometimes causes such severe pain that taking morphine is unavoidable.
But the strong opiate has side effects, including nausea, vomiting and itching. Science has therefore been looking for an alternative pain therapy for some time. A team led by Mario Alonso Puig from the Spanish Juegaterapia Foundation has now successfully tried video games. The children in the study were allowed to play on the PlayStation Vita for up to three hours a day. There were platform, sports, puzzle and strategy games to choose from.
The result: The children perceived their pain almost a third less, as Puig and his colleagues report. As a result, they used one-fifth less morphine on gaming days than on non-video game days. This also reduced the side effects of the painkillers, which enabled the children to have a better quality of life.
Virtual winter landscape relieves burns
Video games have also proven to be helpful for painful burns. Since the pain of burn victims is greatest during the dressing change, the video game “SnowWorld” starts right there and aims to make the procedure as comfortable as possible. The player puts on virtual reality glasses and finds himself in an icy winter landscape. There he has to throw snowballs at snowmen, penguins and mammoths.
“The game has two positive effects: It conveys the feeling of cold and ice, which has a very calming effect on the patients. They are also distracted by throwing snowballs and focus less on the pain,” explains Linda Breitlauch, Professor of Game Design at Trier University of Applied Sciences interview. According to a clinical study, the game was able to reduce patients’ pain perception by 30 to 50 percent.
With virtual snowball fights and winter worlds, SnowWorld distracts burn victims from their pain. © Military Health