People who live with chronic pain from injuries or medical conditions such as certain autoimmune disorders or fibromyalgia know that the constant pain can wear down the body, mind and spirit. Living with chronic pain can become unbearable at times, resulting in long-term use of pain killers, muscle relaxers, and even sleeping pills in order to rest.
Some people, concerned about the long-term effects of taking so much medication for chronic pain, or those who do not like the adverse side effects of harsh medication, have opted to find more natural ways to manage chronic pain without taking all the pills. Meditation, aromatherapy, massage, relaxation techniques and the like have shown moderate help in reducing pain short term.
Another way of controlling chronic pain or minor temporary pain from injury or surgery is, are you ready for this? Video Games!
When my daughter was seven years old, she had to have four major surgeries at the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital in Dallas, Texas, and they fully understood that distracting the brain could help with healing and pain from surgical procedures. They had video games (the Nintendo 64, anyone remember those?), on carts that they would push into the patient’s rooms with a selection of games to play. They also had large projection screen televisions in the Life Center with video games that were played at near life size. Can you imagine Mario actually being a foot tall on the screen?
They knew that distracting the children with an activity that engaged their brains and kept them active could actually lower the amount of pain medication the child needed, and reduce the child’s rating of the severity of pain. This doesn’t just work for kids, though. Adults can receive pain reducing benefits from playing video games too!
To understand why video games can help with pain management, it’s important to understand how the body senses pain. When an injury occurs, the body senses the pain first in the nerves and it runs through the nervous system and eventually sends an electrical signal to the brain, and that signal is translated into the ‘experience’ of pain.
While this is a very simple explanation of pain, and the real process of experiencing pain is actually quite complex and not entirely understood by even the scientists, we do know that when we ‘feel’ pain, our brains are somehow processing that experience.
Some medication for killing pain works on that brain, to block or diminish the signals the brain receives and sends that respond to the sensations of pain in an artificial manner. Meditation helps block or diminish the signals the brain receives and sends in a more natural manner to block the sensation of pain.
It’s long been know that if you can distract yourself and aren’t paying attention say when you’re getting a shot or a finger poke at the doctor, you might not even feel it. When you know that something you are about to do is going to hurt, such as having to stretch or clean a wound, you can prepare yourself for the pain by thinking certain thoughts, distracting yourself, or focusing on other things.
Even the pain of childbirth can be somewhat diminished and handled by using brain focusing techniques, breathing exercises, and other things to take your mind off the pain of labor. Cancer patients receiving chemotherapy have long used distraction-therapy to help with chronic pain.
That’s where video games come into the picture.
Video games use several different parts of the brain at one time, particularly those video games that are very active and require strategy and move quickly. The colors, sounds, music, and graphics of the video game distracts the sensory preceptors, while playing the game activates parts of the nervous system and muscle to respond to vision, auditory and mechanical responses. You have to push buttons, move the joystick, meet objectives, watch out for enemies or dangers in the story, or work through the strategy of the game while physically responding with your hands, eyes, and ears.
Video games can’t cure chronic pain, but it has been shown that while actively engaged in playing video games, people who experience chronic pain will report a lessening in the sensation of that pain while playing. In fact, for a time after playing video games, chronic pain suffers also report a reduction in the overall sensation of pain.
The attention, focus and fun of playing a video game that challenges and stimulates can actually reduce the sensation of chronic pain or even temporarily eliminate it by distracting the brain from sensing the pain.
So the next time your child is complaining of an earache, set up the PlayStation! Or your husband has a bad back and can’t move, ask him to walk into the living room and put on his favorite football simulation game! Menstrual cramps? Play a few rounds of online Mahjong. If you have a toothache… well, you get the idea!
