During all 12 of the 90-minute sessions, the experiences increase in intensity until the patients begin to experience the stress with increased heart rates and sweating. As the clients begin to react, Dr. Ready talks them through it. With virtual-reality therapy, he has one foot in Vietnam and one foot in the laboratory. And he's got a buddy there talking to him. So far, Dr. Ready has seen the severity of the symptoms reduced by a third in all 10 people who who have completed the training, on par with other therapies.
Early indications are that the effects last for months.
The realistic nature of virtual reality, the feeling of being there, is also helping to increase the effectiveness of traditional kinds of biofeedback. Dr. Alan T. Pope, a researcher at the Langley NASA Research Center in Langley, Va., has devised a virtual reality system to treat restricted blood flow to the hands, a problem that afflicts people with diabetes and Raynaud's disease. The patient wears sensors on the hand and arm that provide data to a computer, which converts the information into a simulation of the blood-vessel network. The three-dimensional blood vessel graphics are displayed on a computer monitor in a pair of goggles that the patient wears. Because the subjects are immersed in virtual worlds and their conscious attention is solely devoted to hand-warming, the task becomes easier.