The price of pain relief, or should non-invasive medical devices be treated differently in analgesic clinical trials?

Abstract

This journal recently published a paper entitled "A virtual reality system for pain and anxiety management during outpatient hysteroscopy - A randomized-control trial." (Fouks et al., 202*). In this study involving 82 patients, the authors failed to evidence any superiority of immersive virtual reality (VR) vs. care-as-usual (CAU), while other published studies, such as several ones in paediatrics (Eijlers et al. 2019; Lambert et al. 2020), were in favour of VR. Either so-called "negative" or "positive", any new trial is important to increase our knowledge about this emergent therapy.