From Near-Death to Innovation: How Paincation Is Transforming Autoimmune Care

So the name Painkation, where did that come from? Like, how did you come up with that name? Originally, I designed a product for virtual reality that would allow an individual to self triage and treat themselves for muscular, you know, MSK injury using digital twins, that kind of thing. It was way too early really for that kind of thing. And there's the business models don't align either. Under FDA laws in your country, you have to provide headset as well as, you know, the actual software solution. So doesn't work, you know, further down the line. It will, I've got no doubt now Apple are in the game and Google are falling close behind. But the concept for pain cation was around that whole kind of pain distraction therapy. Yeah, years ago when I was 30, I literally died from Crohn's disease. Yeah, I'd had probably 10 years of excruciating pain where literally all my organs around the small bowel had literally just fused together. And I can remember kind of taking a load of painkillers, you know, opioid painkillers. I managed to get in the car, drive to the ER room and I crawled, crawled up on the counter and basically said, I don't feel well. And I woke up six weeks later with a crowd around the bed, not expecting me to pull through, but feeling fortunately I did. So pain really was born out of that experience, which repeated itself a decade later when I was 40. Fortunately, I'm. I'm fine now. The main problems with autoimmune diseases, which Crohn's being just one of a hundred, is, is because you're constantly in pain. You get separated from friends, sometimes family as well, and you get lonely, isolated. And that brings on lots of mental health problems. Anxiety leading to depression. And then if you do get a period of decent health, you kind of get agoraphobic and are too scared to go outside because it becomes not the normal thing to do. So this is the. This is kind of what painkation solves in in its kind of first iteration of product, which we're starting to build soon. We're using Apple Vision Pro, the new VR headset or mixed reality headset from Apple. And it's very much a social plat where we're matching people up with the same autoimmune illness so they can kind of chat and self support. Yeah, there's some funky stuff going on there as well. You know, we've got equine therapy, so you and your friends can look after a horse in a headset in the same kind of room and then when you're on your own, you can go ride it. We've got lots of different kind of animal, let's call them AI pets that do specific things. A polar bear that will bring you down from a panic attack. What we found is with a lot of young women with endometriosis, for instance, before a period or their menstrual cycle, they get a big buildup of anxiety because they know the pain is about to arrive. You know, so it's providing things that help, you know, bring people down from that panic attack. And what better than a giant polar bear and the driving ice and snow, which is conversational. So, so the bear will talk to you and all of a sudden you forget about the panic attack and you're having a conversation with a polar bear. And that's basically what it boils down to. That's fascinating. Or Kundalini yoga with a ring tailed lima or mindfulness with a tiger called mango. So all of these things are designed to help as one. I've got a lot of academics that I'm working with through public health, nutritional epidemiologists as well as. So what we're looking at doing is creating really easy to follow augmented reality kind of recipes that can be followed actually while you're cooking. So think about that Tom Cruise film Minority Report where you're kind of, you know, swiping these kind of virtual things in front of you. It's very much like that. It really is convenient. And there you go. So that's what Pancation does in its kind of second iteration, Pancation dtx, we're looking at solving more mental health problems and the pain distraction therapies through medical device. So that's kind of where we're going with it in the kind of longer term. So yeah.