Virtual Reality Soothes Young Burn Patients

[flashl]

High-tech game designed to distract kids during daily, painful treatments

(HealthDay News) -- A spilled pot of boiling pasta left 6-year-old Nathan Neisinger of Marysville, Wash., with such severe burns on his torso and arms that doctors initially gave him only a 60 percent chance of survival.

Nathan did survive, only to face a terrifying new reality -- three long months of painful, daily wound scrubbing and cleaning, plus arduous physiotherapy, most of it performed with a minimum of anesthesia.

Then virtual reality -- in the form of a high-tech game designed specifically for burn victims -- came to his rescue.

The game is called SnowWorld, and when young burn victims put on its high-tech helmet and get involved in playing, they lose sight of the nurses, equipment and other fearful sights and sounds around them. Instead, they're immersed in an Arctic world where they lob virtual snowballs at penguins, snowmen and roaring woolly mammoths while speeding through hairpin turns in a canyon of ice.

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[Fire_Medic_Dave]

1. Why was it performed with a minimum of anesthesia?

[Celebration]

2. Did you read it?

Pediatric burn victims, especially, need some form of non-medicinal pain control during their treatment. That's because methods commonly used in adult patients -- drugs like morphine, or artificially induced comas -- are simply too risky for use in children.

"In fact, all they could give Nathan was a light dose of oxycontin," Heidi Neisinger said.