Study: Video Games a Form of Pain Relief

If meeting the family this Christmas is going to be a particularly painful experience for you, then you might want to turn to video games to take the edge off. According to an American doctor and a recent study, playing games actually alleviates real physical pain, too.

Dr. Charles Friedman of Pain Relief Centers, said that motion-controlled gaming such as Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Kinect allow sufferers to become distracted enough to relieve some of their pain. "Acute pain is shown to be noticeably reduced in children and adult sufferers once engaged in video game activity," he said.

Findings from a study conducted by the American Pain Society - a group of doctors and scientists that work to examine the causes and reductions of pain-related suffering - have supported Friedman's claims. It shows that focusing on video games allows the user to temporarily forget about any pain.

But the APS has stressed that games do not simply distract users - there's a more complicated mechanism at work that allows people to deal with serious pain and procedures such as burn wounds or chemotherapy. For the former case, playing games reportedly reduced patient's pain from 30 to 50 per cent.

So the next time you're trying to get your gran to play Wii Sports with you and she complains of a bad back, you can use this as a reason to get her off the sofa.