Virtual Reality for Chronic Pain?

Dr. Luana Colloca on the Brain’s Inner Pharmacy 

What if chronic pain relief could come not from a pill bottle, but from a headset?

That’s the focus of Dr. Luana Colloca, MD, PhD’s, groundbreaking research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, funded by the National Institutes of Health. Colloca, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing and director of the Placebo Beyond Opinions Center, is studying how immersive virtual reality (VR) can reduce pain and even replace the need for opioid medications in some patients. 

“Virtual reality is a digital therapeutic,” Colloca explained. “The goal is to help patients cope with their pain—but also restructure the neuronal mechanisms that sustain pain.” 

The implications are far-reaching. In a time when the opioid crisis still grips communities and chronic pain affects millions, research like Colloca’s offers new hope—and new tools. 

In a new video Q&A, Colloca discusses how her team is using brain imaging, pharmacological techniques, and virtual home trials to explore what she calls the brain’s “inner pharmacy.” You can read a few of her answers below or watch and listen as she delves deeper into her research. 

Questions

What are you hoping to learn through your research on virtual reality?

“Virtual reality is a digital therapeutic. In the era of digital medicine, there is a huge interest to  understand how digital therapeutics can help medicine. In our case, we target chronic pain—people who suffer from pain at least in three months and much longer, sometimes years or an entire life,” Colloca said. “So, the goal is to find the mechanisms that are an alternative to opioids and other pharmacological approach to understand how virtual reality can mitigate pain. And the goal is to help patients to cope with their pain, but also to restructure the neuronal mechanism that sustain pain.” 

What does the virtual reality experience look or feel like for the patient?

“I can try to describe how the patient perceives virtual reality by sharing some patient testimonials,” Colloca said, and recounted that someone with fibromyalgia tried the VR where they were immersed in an underwater environment with pink jellyfish and ambient music. 

The patient told her their pain went away, and Colloca noted, “Fibromyalgia patients have this widely spread pain, and often the way they describe the pain is as something as cascading and very, you know, dramatic. [To] see the patient smiling and see this patient sharing with us, ‘my pain disappear,’ made me even more interested in understanding what is the mechanism beyond the virtual reality?” 

What does your research mean for people who are looking for pain relief without relying on medications like opioids?

Colloca shared one participant’s story, saying, “He was using oxycodone to control his pain, and he realized and shared with the family that this oxycodone started to create dependence.” 

She added that the patient had experienced addiction 20 years earlier, adding to worries about taking oxycodone, and went on to explain, “He enrolled in our trial, and he mentioned that soon after using, after a few days, he didn't feel the need to control pharmacologically—and in particular with opioids—his pain.”