SnowWorld

For troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deepest physical pain often comes much later — weeks, or even months, after the incident. That was the case for Sam Brown, whose story appears in this month's GQ magazine.

Two researchers at the University of Washington's Medical Center in Seattle were working with burn patients who, like Brown, weren't responding to pain medication. One of those researchers is David Patterson.


"It takes a certain amount of attention to process pain," Patterson says. "If you are able to put that attention elsewhere, there is less attention to process pain, and consequently, people will feel less pain."


"So we created a world that was the antithesis of fire," Hoffman says. "The opposite of fire, a cool place snowmen, pleasant images, just about everything to keep them from thinking about fire."

They called it SnowWorld.



Click the link below to go to NPR for the audio story.

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