This one isn’t much to do with social aspects of VR, but it’s good news all the same…While the physiological realities of cancer, and its subsequent treatment, are well understood by those who have had any exposure to it, less understood is the massive psychological strain individuals are put under as they transition from a regular person, to a patient, and hopefully, to a cancer survivor. Virtual reality treatment, or VRT, is allowing a rapidly expanding frontier of new, immersive approaches to psychological treatment.

In a review article from the Journal of Cellular Physiology from Chirico et al., published in February of 2016, the authors note that VRT has been utilised to treat a number of uncomfortable components of the oncological treatment process:

VR has been successfully introduced to the chemotherapy infusion process in order to address the experience of acute or chronic nausea and fatigue (Fisch et al. 2012). The use of VRT has been employed in pain management through cognitive-behavourial methods, distraction interventions and during the carrying out of painful procedures. This reduced the patient’s capacity to process pain, as the theory goes, due to humans having finite attentional capacity (Gershon et al. 2003). VRT allowed for the negative effects of hospitalization (anxiety, depression, fatigue etc.) to be lessened (Espinoza et al. 2012) and elicited positive emotional responses (Baños et al. 2013).

The authors of the review conclude that the ‘abatement of distress is central to oncological care’, and that while additional research is required on precisely what the causes of the positive results of VRT are regarding cancer treatment, VR currently stands as a treatment medium with a huge amount of potential, proving in over 19 studies its positive effect on emotional welfare and on the psychological factors of cancer treatment. The authors suggest that the addition of biosensors and electroencephalogram monitoring should give future researchers a better idea of the benefits of VRT, both to the cancer treatment process as well as a host of other psychological stressors.

Chirico, A., Lucidi, F., De Laurentiis, M., Milanese, C., Napoli, A., & Giordano, A. (2016). Virtual Reality in Health System: Beyond Entertainment. A Mini‐Review on the Efficacy of VR During Cancer Treatment. Journal of cellular physiology, 231(2), 275-287.

Gershon J, Zimand E, Lemos R, Rothbaum BO, Hodges L. 2003. Use of virtual reality as a distractor for painful procedures in a patient with pediatric cancer: A case study. Cyberpsychol Behav 6:657–661.

Fisch MJ, Lee JW, Weiss M, Wagner LI, Chang VT, Cella D, Manola JB, Minasian LM, McCaskill-Stevens W, Mendoza TR, Cleeland CS. 2012. Prospective, observational study of pain and analgesic prescribing in medical oncology outpatients with breast, colorectal, lung, or prostate cancer. J Clin Oncol 30:1980–1988.

Baños RM, Espinoza M, García-Palacios A, Cervera JM, Esquerdo G, Barrajón E, Botella C. 2013. A positive psychological intervention using virtual reality for patients with advanced cancer in a hospital setting: A pilot study to assess feasibility. Support Care Cancer 21:263–270.

Espinoza M, Baños RM, García-Palacios A, Cervera JM, Esquerdo G, Barrajón E, Botella C. 2012. Promotion of emotional wellbeing in oncology inpatients using VR. Stud Health Technol Inform 181:53–57.