A patient of Dr. Roué in full immersion. – Lille Sud Clinic
- Virtual reality headsets are used at the Lille Sud clinic. The device helps reduce the anxiety of patients undergoing an operation.
- The projected videos combine hypnosis and music therapy.
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Dissociate body and mind. After a test period of several months, the Lille Sud clinic, of the Ramsay Santé group, has definitively adopted an innovative system for reduce patient anxiety undergoing a surgical operation:
virtual reality. The device combines music therapy and
hypnosis.
Virtual reality, everyone now knows. Widely developed for video games, it is also used by real estate agencies or to train mechanics on board nuclear submarines. Cédric Roué, liberal anesthesiologist working at the Lille Sud clinic, had the idea of adapting the principle to surgical operations as is already the case in other hospitals in France. “For most patients, the operating room is a stressful environment. So the idea is to distract the person from everything that is going on around them, “said the doctor.
Very worked “hypnotic sequences”
The problem does not arise under general anesthesia, except that most operations no longer require the patient to fall asleep completely. “During an intervention with loco-regional anesthesia, the person perceives everything that is happening, including the words of the doctors and certain noises that are sometimes very unpleasant,” continues the anesthesiologist. So nothing like sending the mind to walk in the forest, in the snowy mountain or on the beach to distract it from non-virtual reality.
However, it is not just a matter of projecting beautiful images into the helmet. “It’s a very worked environment with soft music, fluent speech. There are even images, such as balloons that inflate for example, to lock onto the patient’s respiratory rate and allow their heart rate to be lowered, ”explains Dr Roué. These “hypnotic sequences” are thus developed specifically for this type of use.
For this to work and for the patient’s stress to decrease, the videos must respect three key words: immersion, imagination and distraction. “We have feedback from 130 patients. We go from an anxiety level between 5 and 6 [sur 10] without the helmet at a level between 2 and 3 with the helmet, ”says the doctor.
Before this solution, to act on patient stress, there were not a thousand methods. For relatively long surgical operations, hypnosis can be used. But in the case of rapid interventions, this does not work, as the patient does not have time to go into a hypnotic trance. “There was still drug sedation, but the advantage of virtual reality is precisely to reduce the consumption of drugs,” adds Dr. Roué.
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