Metaverse Healthcare

The metaverse wave is driving yet another internet revolution, and its impact on various industries has become a new proposition of the era. Against this backdrop, the healthcare field is welcoming a whole new landscape. This book is a cross-disciplinary collaboration by Luan Guoming, a neurosurgery expert at the Sanbo Brain Hospital of Capital Medical University; Lu Xiaoyin, a director of Perfect World Co., Ltd.; and Xue Shaohua, deputy director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Society at Beijing Institute of Technology. It explores the emerging concept of "metaverse healthcare" from multiple angles. The book begins with information costs and information barriers in healthcare, outlining the reconstruction of the "hospital-physician-patient" relationship in the metaverse, virtual research scenarios, changes in medical product development and the transmission of medical education, and presents gamified therapeutic pathways such as mental health functional games, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and fear disorders, pain management, and neurofeedback, as well as the real-world soil of telemedicine, virtual hospitals, drug traceability, and medical data synchronization. The authors do not avoid problems: a dedicated chapter discusses ethical issues in technology such as the blurring boundaries between health and disease, AI-generated information, and brain-computer interfaces, and philosophically asks about the authenticity of the virtual world, the relationship between the virtual and the fictional, and how the metaverse can return healthcare to a human-centered approach.