Non-drug therapies, better known as “non-drug interventions”, are tending to develop. The more time passes, the more numerous they become. It is therefore sometimes difficult to navigate and succeed in distinguishing between medicine and more nebulous practices.
Just like non-pharmacological interventions (NMI), virtual reality is developing to complement therapeutic and medicinal actions. Virtual reality is also regularly used in care processes using non-drug interventions. We offer you a quick overview of INMs in order to understand what we mean by these terms and to know where these practices stand. Then, we will look at the links between virtual reality and non-drug interventions.
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What are non-drug interventions?
Grégory Ninot, professor at the University of Montpellier, research fellow at the Montpellier Cancer Institute, founder and director of the CEPS collaborative university platform, defined non-drug interventions .
According to him, an INM is “a psychological, bodily, nutritional, digital or ergonomic intervention on a person aimed at preventing, treating or curing. It materializes in the form of a protocol. It is the subject of at least one positive intervention study carried out according to a recognized methodology, having assessed its benefits and risks”.
There are as many non-pharmacological interventions as there are drugs, that is to say, around 10,000. This is why Grégory Ninot proposes the following classification table:
Source: CEPS Platform, Universities of Montpellier. 2020.
INMs allow the patient to become active and no longer passive in the face of the disease. Which is an extremely positive factor, as stated by psychiatrist Patrick Clervoy, for whom healing is an active process.
INMs have a preventive and therapeutic action. The objective is to integrate non-drug interventions into the care pathway for a person who is sick or at risk of an illness. The fact that INMs are based on science and qualitative research with positive results gives a new resonance to these practices.
Virtual reality and INM.
The objective of INM can be therapeutic or curative, or even preventive. Likewise, nowadays virtual reality is used more and more in healthcare courses. There are numerous examples of the use of virtual reality to treat phobias, or as an alternative to anesthesia. It is therefore logical to see virtual reality integrated into the classification of the different INMs.
As a possible non-drug intervention, virtual reality offers the advantage of having several applications . Indeed, it can serve as a therapeutic tool in the treatment process for various mental illnesses or physical pain.
We could, for example, cite the use of virtual reality in the context of practicing eye movements; this therapy is used in particular in the treatment of post-traumatic after-effects. Additionally, during behavioral and cognitive therapies, virtual reality can be an extremely valuable tool. To this we could add advances in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, via virtual reality, as shown by the teams at the Nice hospital center .
Finally, although the list is not exhaustive, we can also point out the presence of virtual reality in meditation exercises, but especially in the development of the practice of cardiac coherence. A practice whose benefits for our mental and physical health are numerous and which helps each of us, sick or not.
