In the soaring domain of health technologies, immersive VR has been surprisingly successful as a new therapeutic approach. Its analgesic effects may be familiar as a form of ‘pain distraction.’ Less well known is its usefulness for treating long-term chronic pain in multiple ways, from analgia and physical therapy to neuromodulation and reintegrating body image and body schema. Although pain is a fundamental alarm that rivets our attention to impending physical damage or infection, chronic pain is known as ‘a silent epidemic’ made visible, unfortunately, by the opioid epidemic. By the most conservative estimates by the World Health Organization and the International Association for the Study of Pain, 1 in 5 people suffer from this complex, degenerative condition. Although chronic pain has no known biomarkers and no cure, XR approaches appear especially useful for patients’ biopsychosocial challenges. Moreover, results from neuroimaging provocatively suggest that VR — especially as a system that integrates AI, biosensors, visualization and tracking capabilities — may enables its users to forge new neural pathways that may persist beyond the reach of the pain processing dysfunction that is widely thought to account for chronic pain. Such use of XR technologies promise to deliver what Dr. Eric Topol described as “increasing the capacity of healthcare” when we need it most, and its recent adoption across the American Veteran’s Administration’s American facilities is an important marker of XR’s real world benefits.