Imagine the cure for addiction looked like a video game.

With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Department of Defense, assistant professor at Duke University in the USA, Zach Rosenthal might have found a way to help the helpless.

How can something that looks like video game save you from addiction? Virtual reality worlds are being designed to replicate the environments an addict would normally be faced with in day to day life. The methodology called “cue reactivity” aims to help simulation participants to develop coping strategies for those environments.

So far the trials have placed subjects in crack houses, bars and areas that they struggle to deal with in reality. The simulations are further customized with paraphernalia that increase the sense of reality. But can people really take the coping strategies that they develop in simulation back to the real world?

The process is still very new, but is having some successful with smoking habits and phobias.

One can only hope that the same system used to cure you of your phobia of hairy arachnids can do the same for a debilitating drug addiction.

[Source: Popsci,Dailymail]