Anxiety and pain are the commonest symptoms in clinical practice and effective management of these is crucial to optimise medical procedures, boost patients’ satisfaction, reduce hospital stay and minimise long-term analgesic dependence. Hence, some sort of distraction and relaxation techniques becomes necessary to keep the patient at ease during the procedure. Various modalities have been tried including music 1, watching videos 1, virtual reality (VR) 2, stress balls 3, etc., The use of virtual reality (VR) technology has emerged as a potential tool to distract patients and to modify their perception of pain 2. Previous studies have shown that distraction is the most common technique used to reduce pain in short invasive medical procedures 4. Techniques like watching video via VR prevents patients from seeing what is happening in the real world and directs the focus on what is going on in the virtual world and it works by utilizing some part of human’s cognitive capacity leaving less of it available for processing pain 2. Its adoption in clinical practice especially in dermatology remains limited.

Dermatology practice also includes several minor procedures for skin lesions, including skin cancers, most of which are done performed under topical or injectable local anaesthesia. Pain and anxiety during the procedure is a significant concern since the patient is alert and awake intraoperatively and can be challenging for both clinicians and patients 3. Several previous studies have assessed the role of VR in the management of pain and anxiety in medical and surgical procedures. However, studies the efficacy of VR on pain and anxiety during dermatological procedures is scarce.

Hence, we propose to study the efficacy of VR on pain and anxiety during dermatological procedures which has not been evaluated so far to the best of our knowledge.

This study will assess the efficacy of virtual reality as a clinical tool in the alleviation of pain and anxiety during dermatological procedures.