06:02 PM PDT on Thursday, July 22, 2004

By JEAN ENERSEN / KING 5 News

When Nathan's mother was cooking pasta, the 6-year-old pulled it down on himself. Now he has endured skin grafts, months of wound care and more pain than any narcotic can safely treat.

"It can ease their pain but their mind's still directed to they're gonna go into the tank room, they're gonna get scrubbed down," said Nathan's mother, Heidi.

KING Scientists have created the ultimate escape: Snow World.

Then there's physical therapy to stretch his scarred skin. But through it all, Nathan's brain can go off to play in a 3-D computer-generated world.

"What we're really trying to do is just to pull his attention away from what's happening in the therapy to put his attention in the virtual world and by virtue of that, have him experience less pain," said David Patterson, PhD, of Harborview Medical Center.

Because burn patients often relive their original trauma during wound treatment, researchers created the ultimate escape: snow world. Clinical studies show that it does the job.

"Patients who went into virtual reality reported having large reductions in how much pain they were experiencing, typically 40 to 50 percent reduction on average," said Dr. Hunter Hoffman of Harborview.

An article in Scientific American magazine describes how a special virtual reality helmet that could work in an MRI scanner confirmed this. Brain scans showed far fewer pain signals with virtual reality than without it.

"So I didn't feel anything, really, but I did feel some pain, but not that much," said Nathan.

"Anything to get his mind off seeing the nurses with their, you know equipment, trying to work on him helped a lot!" said Heidi.

One day, virtual reality may be standard equipment at hospitals and dental offices to relieve all sorts of pain.