(Bloomberg) -- When Deona Duke woke up from a medically-inducedcoma to begin recovering from burns that covered almost a third ofher body, one of her treatments was hurling snowballs atpenguins.

The 13-year-old was set on fire when a bonfire exploded on herand her friend. To prevent infection, burn victims need theirbandages changed and dead skin scraped away. Sometimes, evenmorphine isn’t enough to make that tolerable.

Related: Should virtual patients worry about theside effects of telemedicine?

At the Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston, Duke’sdoctors gave her a virtual reality (VR) headset. Slipping it on,she was immersed in “SnowWorld,” an icy landscape where she got tolob snow at snowmen and igloos. The Texas hospital is one of thefew trying out virtual reality to relieve pain.

Related: Obama signs bill as opioids take toll onolder women

“I’d never heard of it so I was a little surprised,” she said.“When I first tried it, it distracted me from what they were doingso it helped with the pain.”

It’s still a new and experimental approach, but proponents ofvirtual reality say that it can be an effective treatment foreverything from intense pain to Alzheimer’s disease toarachnophobia to depression. And as Facebook Inc., Sony Corp., HTCCorp. and others race to build a dominant VR set, the price ofhardware has fallen, making the equipment a more affordable optionfor hospitals looking for alternatives for pain relief.

Related: Medical marijauna saving Medicaremillions

The idea is that the worst pain can be alleviated bymanipulating the way the human mind works: the more you focus onpain, the worse it feels. Swamp the brain with an overload ofsensory inputs—such as with the immersion in a virtual world—andits capacity to process pain, to be conscious of it, goes down.

“Pain is our harm alarm and it does a really good job of gettingour attention,” said Beth Darnall, a clinical associate professorat Stanford Health Care’s division of pain medicine. She says VR,which Stanford has done some pilot studies on, is a psychologicaltool, like meditation, that can “calm the nervous system, and thatdampens the pain processing.”

In research done at Shriners by psychologists Hunter Hoffman andWalter Meyer, and similar work done by Dave Patterson at HarborviewBurn Center in Seattle, patients reported less discomfort. Hoffmanexamined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of patients’brains, which showed they actually experienced less pain.

“I was very surprised by it. I didn’t have the expectation of itworking.”

At Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, Ronald Yarbrough is waiting in aroom that overlooks the hospital’s landing pad, hoping to seehelicopter bring him a donor heart. He needs a transplant after hisartificial one failed and is being kept alive by a machine. He hasbeen trying a Samsung Gear VR headset and specially createdsoftware from a startup called AppliedVR. It helped take his mindoff the fact that he’s confined to a small hospital roomthat can feel like a jail cell. When his muscles relaxed, hispain receded, he said.

“I was on a lot of pain medication and I’ve been able to whittlethat down because I’m not sitting around thinking about it,” saidthe 54-year-old former truck driver. He intends to buy a VR headsetwhen he’s discharged. “I was very surprised by it. I didn’t havethe expectation of it working. When I got into it, I wasamazed.”

Proponents of VR are quick to point out that it could have a bigbenefit over drugs, which can lead to tolerance over prolonged useand sometimes addiction.

But VR’s effectiveness still has to be proven, particularly whentrying to combat chronic pain. Does the effect last when theheadset comes off?

“We know that relaxation techniques like hypnosis, yoga, andmeditation decrease your perception of pain, so VR has a lot ofpromise, but it’s too early for it to be the standard of care,”said Houman Danesh, director of integrative pain management atMount Sinai Hospital in New York. “It’s a very youngtechnology.”

There’s a lot more research needed before VR is going to bewidely accepted as a pain relief method. Brennan Spiegel, agastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai who’s also director of healthservices research at the Los Angeles hospital, is about to begin astudy on many more patients.

So far he’s experienced a range of reactions. Older patientstend to be less open to it than younger ones. One terminal patientrefused to even consider it. One woman, who suffered abdominalpain, got such immediate relief that she went home and boughtherself a headset.

The price of a headset and software is tiny compared to theexpense of keeping a patient in the hospital for an extra day.

“As a scientist, I want to understand rigorously how somethinglike virtual reality can truly improve health outcomes compared toa control population,” said Spiegel who said he’s seen some amazingresults in the 150 or so patients he’s tried it on. “Virtualreality undoubtedly has an effect on the human mind.”

VR’s potential for use in pain management was discovered byaccident.

Tom Furness is a professor of industrial engineering at theUniversity of Washington and considered to be the godfather of VRby his peers. He started looking into VR 50 years ago when he wasin the Air Force, and has spun off more than 20 research projectsinto companies. One of them was a 1993 consumer headset that reliedon a TV tuner and video tapes that sold for $799. It was acommercial flop because of the limited content, but a lot ofdentists bought it.

“The dentists loved it because their patients weren’tcomplaining,” he said. The experience distracted children fromtheir fear of injections, drilling and fillings.

That aha moment led to more research into the long-knownphenomena of distraction and meditation as techniques to relievepain.

But just like Furness’ attempt to bring VR to the masses, it washeld up by costs. Early VR equipment for medical use cost as muchas $35,000 for a headset, said Hunter Hoffman, who studied withFurness at the University of Washington.

That’s all set to change this year. VR is graduating from geekysideshow to big business and equipment prices are dropping.

Oculus Rift Headset retails at $599. HTC’s Vive costs $799. Toget them to work, you’ll need a PC that costs about $999 to run thesoftware. The market’s going to continue to expand as Sony adds thecapability to their game consoles and smartphone makers upgradetheir technology to get closer to the kind of performance needed toprovide an effective VR experience.

The economics may make VR an attractive experiment for somehospitals. Hospital care takes up to about 30 percent of the U.S.’sannual $3 trillion in health-care spending, making it the mostcostly category of treatment. The price of a headset and softwareis tiny compared to the expense of keeping a patient in thehospital for an extra day.

So if there’s a chance that VR could lead to an early discharge,it may make sense for a hospital to spend on the hardware, saidCedars-Sinai’s Spiegel.

Companies such as AppliedVR are already trying to make thedistribution and development of the technology into a business.They’re supplying hospitals with the headsets and therapeuticsoftware. Another startup, DeepStream VR, is also working onsoftware and systems that help patients with burns and otherinjuries. Its ‘Cool!’ software features the adventures of anotter.

They may have some work to do to keep patients interested. TheVR made her feel better, but Duke quickly got bored withSnowWorld, and that diminished the painkilling effect.

“For teenagers they should find, like, different games,” shesaid. “That game they were showing me seemed like it was for littlekids.”

Copyright 2018 Bloomberg. All rightsreserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,or redistributed.