What is the role of Second Life in Health Care?

The current concept of virtual education is readily accepted and available in the medical community. Health professionals can train in virtual settings ranging from hands on with a linear accelerator to simpler programs such as the American Heart Association' ACLS review.

Now enter Second Life, the exciting interactive virtual world created by Linden Labs. Second Lifers obtain avatars or virtual persona to communicate with other participants and move about in a multitude of worlds or islands. Second Life has been utilized for training and communication needs in special patient populations, but can the patient-physician relationship exist in a virtual world?

Primary to the patient-physcian relationship is the exchange of verbal and nonverbal communication between parties the goal of which is to establish trust. In real life, patients may be either unable or inept at clearly conveying issues and concerns. Appearance, body language and responsive reactions are important to establishing a repore and are of as much value in diagnosis and treatment as lab values and vital signs. It is novel that a Second Life avatar can sigh or laugh but frequently when assessing a patient, observing gestures and facial expressions are key, such as evaluation of neurologic symptoms or a pain syndrome. Assessment tools such as the Wong-Baker pain scale use examples of facial expressions to assist the clinician and patient to assign a value. It is difficult to envision that a conventional, therapeutic patient-physician relationship could exist within Second Life in most cases.

But Second Life does have value in the information age. It lies in its applications in education for providers and patients and as an adjunct to conventional therapy. There are new applications for providers such as "hands on" in special procedures and sharing of knowledge between health care communities like USU's Virtual Intensive Pediatric Education Resource (VIPER).

Certainly interactive education works well with patients too. I posed the question to friend/physical therapist that perhaps a physical therapy island may be of value and she saw great potential in home therapy with cognitively impaired patients. These patients benefit from exercise to maintain balance and range of motion but it is difficult to keep them on task. She felt a visual program and some simple interactions with an avatar would be of great assistance in home therapy as well as a welcome respite for busy caregivers.

Second Life may be a tool that has some value as part of a rehabilitation/wellness program such as Cardiac Rehab. Stress management is one of the essentials of such a program. There are relaxation techniques that can transfer to virtual space. Incorporating this into an island of recovery where experiences can be shared may be safer and more convenient than the real world. Occasionally participants require an intervention and this would bring it back to the real world where the patient- physician relationship belongs.

I think that Second Life is a unique tool that has a lot of potential in health care as a resource for education, communication and new methods to deliver adjunctive therapy but the patient-physician interaction is human to human. Altering that communication to include virtual concepts is complicating an already challengeing relationship.