Stryker Brigade News

SAN DIEGO -- While the real Iraq is more than enough for most people to handle, there's a virtual Iraq lurking on the laptop of psychologist Skip Rizzo, a research scientist at the University of Southern California.

With a push of a button, special effects will appear -- a mosque's call to prayer, a sandstorm, the sounds of bullets or bombs. "We can put a person in a VR headset and have them walk down the streets of Baghdad," Rizzo said. "They can ride in a Humvee, fly in a helicopter over a battle scene or drive on a desert road."

This is no video game, nor is it a training device. Rizzo and colleagues are developing a psychological tool to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, by bringing soldiers back to the scenes that still haunt them. A similar simulation is in the works for victims of the World Trade Center attacks.

[...] While the process of extracting injured troops from combat zones has been streamlined, the methods for relieving their agony during evacuation has lagged. Until recently, the military's approach to pain control hadn't changed much since the days when the battlefield anesthetics of choice were rum, ether, and narcotics. "In the Civil War, the answer was general anesthesia and morphine," says Chester "Trip" Buckenmaier, an acute pain specialist at Walter Reed. "Two hundred years later, we can do things that doctors then would never have dreamed of - but the answer to pain is general anesthesia and morphine. We're still in the Dark Ages."

General anesthesia, which suppresses the activity of the entire central nervous system, is itself an assault on the body - a little death that requires constant monitoring of heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration, followed by hours in the recovery room. And when traditional anesthesia wears off, the pain returns, requiring patients to take massive doses of morphine or other addictive analgesics as they recuperate.

Now Buckenmaier is leading a group of army doctors and nurses determined, as he puts it, "to drag the military kicking and screaming into the 21st century." His team believes the future of wartime pain control is a new form of anesthesia called a continuous peripheral nerve block, which takes a more targeted approach by switching off only the pain signals coming from the injured limb, leaving patients' vital signs and cortical functions unimpaired.