Kicking
the habit, virtually
Page 2
 ...that
they reported more positive attitudes about height than those
in the control group. More than 50 percent of treatment group
members exposed themselves to heights in the real world without
being asked to do so.
Meanwhile, the cost of
virtual reality technology began to decline. “It was kind
of an intuitive fit with phobias,” said Brenda Wiederhold,
executive director of the Virtual Reality Medical Center in San
Diego, a clinical practice devoted to virtual reality as a tool
for treating psychiatric disorders. Traditionally, therapists
would have patients imagine what they were afraid of or take them
into a real-world situation in order to desensitize them. Now,
therapists can expose patients to a variety of situations right
there in the office. For example, therapists with patients afraid
of flying no longer have to travel all the way to the airport
to have them sit on a plane. Instead, they can expose patients
to a complete flight, making it smooth, turbulent or stormy, in
the course of one therapy session.
Treatment of addicts is
similar in principle to exposure therapy for phobias. One of the
first clinics to use virtual reality to expose addicts to cravings
was Virtually Better in Decatur, Ga. When the center opened in
1996, Ken Graap, the company’s president, helped therapists
treat Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
by exposing them to virtual war scenes. He noticed that a lot
of these men were also addicted to nicotine or other drugs and
wondered if virtual reality could treat those problems, too. He
teamed up with Bordnick, who had been wondering how virtual reality
might help addicts reduce cravings in the real world.
Funded by a grant from
the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bordnick and Graap started
a controlled clinical trail in 2002 with 20 people in order to
determine whether a virtual environment could help smokers quit.
Their first goal was to test whether the cues in the program actually
triggered cravings.
To
enter the virtual world they created, you stand on a platform
and don a helmet equipped with headphones and a visor that falls
over your eyes. The smoking program designed for the study, which
lasts about 20 minutes, consists of three rooms.
The first contains underwater aquarium scenes unrelated to smoking,
what Graap calls a “neutral environment,” where you’re
asked a series of questions about your current desire to smoke.
This allows researchers to get base-line...
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