The role of the anesthesiologist is to care for the patient throughout the perioperative period and to ensure his/her well-being notably through anxiolysis and effective pain management. In addition to conventional drug approaches, an innovative technique is slowly proving its worth in the medical world: virtual reality. While already well known to the general public for its recreational benefits, virtual reality will probably become in the near future an essential tool in the management of pain and anxiety in a wide variety of painful medical procedures. This technology has already been successfully studied in both adult and pediatric patients in a range of potentially painful medical procedures, such as the treatment of wounds in seriously burned patients, dental procedures and routine medical procedures, and has now started to make its way into anesthesiology...
Key words
Virtual reality, pain, anxiety