Citizen Cartwright

Using virtual reality as a pain remedy

Virtual reality is the new kid on the block for pain management, says The New York Times, as the opioid epidemic continues and VR technology becomes more affordable.

 

The technology – which puts viewers in an immersive, multisensory three-dimensional environment – can effectively distract patients from pain, researchers say.

 

VR essentially floods the brain with so much input that it can't register pain signals. When pain messages try to get through, “the brain gives a busy signal,” says Hunter Hoffman, director of the VR research center at the University of Washington in Seattle.

 

The technology also can enhance the effectiveness of established techniques like physical therapy, hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy to treat debilitating chronic pain, says the Times.

 

“If I teach you in a virtual environment, you’re more likely to retain it, engage with it and comply with what you’ve been taught,” says Larry Benz, a physical therapist and chief executive of Confluent Health. “When you’re fully immersed in a virtual environment, it’s like a ‘brain hack’ — you can’t be engaged in anything else.”

 

An article published awhile back in U.S. News & World Report lists the potential benefits of VR for someone suffering from acute or chronic pain as better pain management, a reduced need for painkillers, cost savings, improved movement and learning healthy new skills.

 

“VR is not a panacea or silver bullet, but a tool to teach many different things,” says Jeffrey Gold, director of the pediatric pain management clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Unlike opioids, you don’t become dependent on VR. Rather, you learn skills that can generalize into life without VR. It’s a tool for breaking the cycle of pain and stress that drives the nervous system through the roof. You can learn to think yourself well instead of thinking yourself sick.”

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U.S. ranks 7th out of 143 countries when it comes to stress

Last year, Americans reported feeling stress, anger and worry at the highest levels in a decade, according to Gallup’s 2019 Global Emotions Report, which is based on interviews of more than 151,000 adults across the globe.

 

The 55 percent of Americans who said they were stressed beat the global average of 35 percent by a full 20 percentage points.

 

Younger Americans between the ages of 15 and 49 are among the most stressed, worried and angry in the country. About two thirds of those younger than 50 said they experienced stress a lot, about half said they felt worried a lot and a quarter or more felt anger a lot.

 

So, my fellow Americans, wudda we do?

 

In an article on the Gallup results on the Psychology Today website, pediatrician Alison Escalante says: "The idea of finding a solution to the worldwide epidemic of anxiety is daunting. But I am a physician, and doctors don't accept daunting."

 

Escalante suggests:

 

— Using guided imagery as you fall asleep, integrating self-compassion into your schedule and improving your sleep. (The neuropsychologist who trained me to tutor kids does say that our brain consolidates during sleep the last thing we thought about before we nodded off.)

 

— Practicing mindfulness "regularly, momentarily, under pressure, to move into our calm and connected selves."

 

— Sharing with others reminders that we’re all in this together and can figure it out. While anxiety is epidemic because it’s contagious, so is comfort, Escalante says.

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Reuters: U.S. is scrambling amid new missile gap with China

China’s military is making "giant strides" toward replacing the United States as the supreme power in Asia, according to a Reuters investigation.

 

With the Pentagon distracted by nearly two decades of war in the Mideast and Afghanistan, the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army, has exploited a period of sustained budget increases and rapid technical improvement to build and deploy an arsenal of advanced missiles, Reuters says.

 

Many of these missiles are specifically designed to attack the aircraft carriers and bases that are the backbone of U.S. military dominance in the region and which for decades have protected allies including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Across nearly all categories of these weapons, based on land, loaded on strike aircraft or deployed on warships and submarines, China’s missiles rival or outperform their counterparts in the armories of the United States and its allies, according to current and former U.S. military officers with knowledge of PLA test launches, Taiwanese and Chinese military analysts, and technical specifications published in China’s state-controlled media.

China also has gained a virtual monopoly in one class of conventional missiles – land-based, intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles.

 

Under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War-era agreement to reduce the threat of nuclear conflict, the United States and Russia are banned from deploying this class of missiles.

 

But China, which isn’t a party to the INF Treaty, is deploying them in massive numbers, says Reuters.

China also is making rapid strides in developing so-called hypersonic missiles that can maneuver sharply and travel at five times the speed of sound or faster. The United States currently has no defenses against a missile like this, according to Pentagon officials.

The Pentagon has begun to publicly acknowledge that, at least in missiles, China has the upper hand. “We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China has ground-based ballistic missiles that threaten our basing in the Western Pacific and our ships,” the former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Harry Harris, said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March of last year.

The Trump administration appears to be clearing the way for the United States to compete, says Reuters. On Feb. 1, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the INF treaty, accusing Russia of breaching the agreement. He said in a statement that the United States would quit in six months unless Russia returned to compliance. Trump also said China had more than 1,000 missiles of the range covered by the INF Treaty. He said the United States now would develop a ground-launched conventional missile that would have been banned under the treaty. 

 

This could help to offset China's advantage, military experts say, but it will take time, probably years, for the United States to develop and deploy these weapons.

 

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy has been able to use its carriers to bludgeon weaker enemies, approaching close enough to launch air strikes with the confidence that the giant warships are untouchable. 

 

But now, in the event of conflict with China in East Asia, Pentagon planners and other regional militaries say they're wrestling with how to respond to something they haven't seen since World War II: a return to highly contested warfare at sea.
For the United States and its regional allies, a top priority is to wrest back the lead in the range war, Reuters says.

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'The forgotten middle': Seniors who'll lack the money for the care they’ll need

The private seniors' housing market has focused until now on building complexes aimed at high-income people.

 

And poor seniors qualify for Medicaid, which covers the cost of nursing homes and long-term care.

 

But nobody is making plans for the people who don't have enough saved for a deluxe retirement home but have saved enough that they don't qualify for Medicaid, researchers say.

 

A decade from now, more than half of middle-class seniors in the United States will be unable to afford needed housing and personal assistance, according to a study in the journal Health Affairs.

The number of middle-income people over 75 is estimated to nearly double to 14 million by 2029, up from about 8 million today.

About 54 percent of these seniors won't have enough money to afford an assisted living facility or the kind of personal care to keep them in their own homes, the researchers report.

So what’s the answer for these people?

 

The senior housing market could realize there's a golden opportunity in serving these middle-income seniors, says lead researcher Caroline Pearson, senior vice president for health care at NORC, an independent research institution at the University of Chicago.

"We've got a booming market of very deluxe assisted living, but there might be less elaborate options that would serve a middle market very well," Pearson says.

 

And Medicare could be modernized to make it easier for people to stay in their homes longer, says Cheryl Fish-Parcham, director of access initiatives at Families USA, a consumer health care advocacy group.

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Coming: If you feel like somebody’s watching you in the supermarket, it could be the shelves

New "smart shelf" technology is using cameras to try to guess your age, gender or mood as you walk by, reports The Associated Press.

 

The aim is to use the information to show you targeted real-time ads on in-store video screens. 

 

Companies are pitching retailers to bring the technology into their physical stores as a way to better compete with online rivals like Amazon that already have troves of information on their customers and their buying habits, AP says.

 

At the National Retail Federation trade show in New York earlier this year, a smart shelf on display by Mood Media tried to detect people's “happiness” or “fear” as they stood in front of it — information a store could use to gauge reaction to a product on the shelf or an ad on a screen. 

 

Advocates of the technology say it can benefit shoppers by showing them tailored discounts or drawing attention to products that are on sale. But privacy experts say that even if the information being collected is anonymous, it still can be used in an intrusive way.

 

For example, if many people are eyeing a not-so-healthy dessert but not buying it, a store could place it at the checkout line so you see it again and “maybe your willpower breaks down,” says Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law and co-director of its Tech Policy Lab.

The technology also could lead to discriminatory practices, like raising prices when an older person walks in or pushing products based on your perceived mood such as ads for anti-depression medication if the cameras think you look sad, says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit that researches privacy issues.

 

Kroger, which has 2,800 supermarkets, is testing cameras embedded in a price sign above shelves in two stores in suburbs outside Cincinnati and Seattle.

 

Walgreens, which has more than 8,000 drugstores, has installed cooler doors with cameras and sensors at six locations in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Bellevue, Wash. Instead of the usual clear glass doors, there are video screens that display ads along with the cooler’s contents. Above the door handle is a camera that can try to guess ages and track irises to see where people are looking — although Walgreens says those functions are turned off for now.

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