Experienced parents know that pain is subjective. In one adorable video on TikTok, a tattoo artist painlessly pierces a little girl’s ears by distracting her with goofy questions. This works because pain requires attention. If a child skins his knee while running around at the zoo, it stops hurting as soon as his father points out the roaring lion in the nearby cage. The scrape hasn’t changed; only the amount of brain power assigned to it and therefore the amount of pain experienced.
Researchers are seeking alternative treatments to take advantage of this quirk to supplement or replace opiates. Many studies have confirmed that simple distractions can help us tolerate pain. On a scale from 0-10, for example, listening to music reduces pain by about 0.5.
Much of this research has been undertaken to help burn patients tolerate pain during treatment, including by playing the virtual reality (VR) game SnowWorld. Standard treatment of burns involves administering heavy doses of morphine to help manage the pain. However, opioids often fail to numb patients completely and can have a variety of side effects, including nausea and cognitive problems. They can also be highly addictive.
In addition to standard painkillers, patients in these experiments wear a VR headset over their faces, filling their full field of vision. When they look around, they are in an icy tundra. They spend their treatment throwing virtual snowballs at snowmen and wooly mammoths while Paul Simon music plays in the background.
Remarkably, this distraction reduces pain at least as well as morphine. A meta-analysis reviewed 10 studies which compared standard care with treatment including virtual reality games. The studies found that patients who played VR games:
- experienced significantly reduced pain
- tolerated longer treatment
- experienced less nausea
- thought about pain less during the procedures
- complied with more physical therapy
Some saw these results and concluded that video games are as dangerous for children as morphine. “[J]ust what effect is this digital drug – which is more powerful than morphine – having on the brains and nervous systems of seven-year-olds – or fourteen year-olds – who are ingesting very similar digital drugs via their glowing screens?” asked Nicholas Kardaras in his book Glow Kids. “And, further, if stimulating screens are indeed more powerful than morphine, can they be just as addicting?”
One should not conflate video games and morphine simply because they both reduce the experience of pain. Bringing an umbrella and staying inside both keep me dry in a storm, but an umbrella is not a home. Video games can reduce the experience of pain by distracting us. They are a promising tool for lowering our use of opioids, particularly during acute medical procedures. However, this benefit does not make them “digital morphine.”
