"With few alternative treatments available, that “something” too often meant the reflexive prescription of opioids. It didn’t help that, at the time, Purdue Pharmaceuticals aggressively marketed OxyContin as a non-habit forming form of oxycodone, giving doctors an easy “fix” for patients’ pain. “The combination of not being trained well at managing pain, [being] encouraged to do more of it, and now having all these powerful opioids available,” Suzuki concluded, created the fertile ground for our nation’s pain-pill problem...
VR pain relief may sound complex and futuristic, but the underlying mechanism isn’t much more sophisticated than the actions of a mother making silly faces at her son while he’s vaccinated. “Pain requires conscious attention,” Hoffman said. “Virtual reality uses up a lot of attentional resources [so] the brain has less attention available to process incoming pain signals.” Hoffman and Patterson have provided convincing evidence of their treatment’s effect by using FMRI to analyze neural patterns, which show less pain related brain activity for patients receiving VR."
It's like this buzzy thing that helps children take shots.
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