If you’re one of the millions dealing with chronic nerve pain and you’re tired of your doctor tossing you pain meds like breath mints, science might have just found a way to silence your suffering.How? By essentially teaching you how to ignore it by playing a game. PainWaive is a neurofeedback game that doesn’t just distract you from pain, it retrains your brain to feel less of it. Created by researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, PainWaive is a drug-free, in-home system that uses an EEG headset and an app that corrals your brain waves and allows you to harness their patterns. It sounds like woo-woo nonsense science, designed to sell an expensive product to desperate people. But there is solid pain management science at play here, and the research behind it seems to check out so far.Brain Training Game Offers Alternative Drug-Free Pain ManagementThe way it works is that patients play interactive games while learning to reduce the abnormal brain activity linked to chronic nerve pain. Essentially, it’s meditation but with a high score. It’s a game that uses the principles of meditation to allow you to more easily shift your focus away from your pain.The pilot study focused on a painful condition called corneal neuropathic pain, a rare kind of hypersensitivity that makes your face and eyes feel immense pain from non-painful stimuli. No one knows what causes it, so there really isn’t a treatment for it. The UNSW team found that people with this kind of nerve pain share an odd brainwave pattern that interferes with how the thalamus communicates with other parts of the brain.The researchers wondered if there was a way to teach the brain to self-regulate using biofeedback and video games. Four participants signed up for twenty sessions of PainWaive over four weeks. Three out of four reported pain relief comparable to opioids. The results stuck around for five weeks after the treatment ended.Four people aren’t a lot. And yes, the placebo effect could be at play here. But it is promising that what essentially amounts to a videogame can rival the pain-relieving effects of prescription medication without the risk of chemical addiction.The post This Video Game Teaches Your Brain to Ignore Pain appeared first on VICE.