Virtual real

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How Do Doctors Use Virtual Reality to Treat Phobias?
By Billy Kirk, eHow Contributor

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Exposure Therapy
1. Doctors have long used a variety ofmethods to treat ailments and fears. Many therapy options exist, but exposure therapy has been a favorite for some time. This method of therapy is used to ease feelings of fear in the patient and slowly erode phobias. This erosion of the phobia occurs thanks to the therapist slowly introducing the patient to what he fears most, in controlled conditions.
Virtual reality, however, is providing somesweeping changes to the science of therapy treatments--and pivotal among these changes lies a new take on an old method of therapy. With virtual reality in mind, exposure therapy has been adapted and becomes virtual reality exposure therapy, a cornerstone of the virtual reality therapy movement.
Virtual Reality Applications
2. The key difference between traditional exposure therapy andvirtual reality exposure therapy is that in virtual reality therapy, patients never have to leave the doctor's office and never have to make a trip to an outside location. This is not only a less expensive option than traditional exposure therapy, it's one that is likely more attractive to the therapy patient. The patient doesn't have to face his fear so directly by going to an on-location therapysession. Instead, nothing is real-virtual reality takes over and takes him to a virtual destination or situation that is indicative of what he fears the most.
Habituation
3. The key to these virtual reality worlds working as a tool for therapy lies with habituation. Obviously, a virtual reality world is not real, and the patient knows this. Can a virtual reality setting effectively replaceon-location exposure therapy in the real world? Doctors believe so, and results from testing confirm that with some patients it can, over time. The key to this relies on the ability of the patient to eventually treat and accept the virtual reality world as if it were real. Over various treatments this does happen in many cases, and this is known as habituation. Habituation simply means that the therpaypatient becomes acclimated to the physical world and accepts that she is inside it and a part of it. Additionally, many patients have grown accustomed to and accepted the presence of virtual reality characters that have been used to teach moral lessons or help with exposure. Over time, these virtual characters have been responded to as being real. In fact, some doctors believe that the issue ofvirtual versus real isn't that large and that the issue of gender instead is more important. Either way, it is clear that virtual reality exposure treatments and other VR treatments have their place in modern therapy, and they have grown in effectiveness and frequency of application.

Virtual Reality Therapy to Treat Phobiashttp://www.articlesbase.com/mental-health-articles/virtual-reality-therapy-to-treat-phobias-604518.html
Posted: Oct 15, 2008
We are in the 21st century, so high-tech gadgets would, of course, present themselves to treat phobias and fears. In actuality, virtual reality has proven to be quite effective in treating phobias - especially arachnophobia.
This is one therapy you will not be able to do on your own. You will have to find a place that offers this treatmentsince it requires a virtual reality setup. However, we can touch on the basics of what it can do and how it works.
Virtual Reality (VR) is a type of exposure therapy in a virtual setting that is safer, less embarrassing, and less costly than reproducing the real world situations. Besides situations can be created that are difficult to find in real life and it's more realistic than imagining the...