The following is maybe a little out-of-left-field, but maybe something you have a right to know even if it doesn't directly apply to you.
http://endthepainproject.org/phantomlimbinfo.htmlfrom
The Itch, Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, June 30, 2008.
" . . . The experiences of phantom-limb patients sounded familiar to him. When I mentioned that he might want to try the mirror-box treatment, he agreed. I have a mirror upstairs, he said.
He brought a cheval glass down to the living room, and I had him stand with his chest against the side of it, so that his troublesome left arm was behind it and his normal right arm was in front. He tipped his head so that when he looked into the mirror the image of his right arm seemed to occupy the same position as his left arm. Then I had him wave his arms, his actual arms, as if he were conducting an orchestra.
The first thing he expressed was disappointment. It is not quite like looking at my left hand, he said. But then suddenly it was.
Wow! he said. Now, this is odd.
After a moment or two, I noticed that he had stopped moving his left arm. Yet he reported that he still felt as if it were moving. What is more, the sensations in it had changed dramatically. For the first time in eleven years, he felt his left hand snap back to normal size. He felt the burning pain in his arm diminish. And the itch, too, was dulled.
This is positively bizarre, he said.
He still felt the pain and the itch in his neck and shoulder, where the image in the mirror cut off. And, when he came away from the mirror, the aberrant sensations in his left arm returned. He began using the mirror a few times a day, for fifteen minutes or so at a stretch, and I checked in with him periodically.
What is most dramatic is the change in the size of my hand, he says. After a couple of weeks, his hand returned to feeling normal in size all day long.
The mirror also provided the first effective treatment he has had for the flares of itch and pain that sporadically seize him. Where once he could do nothing but sit and wait for the torment to subside, it sometimes took an hour or more, he now just pulls out the mirror. I have never had anything like this before, he said. It is my magic mirror.
There have been other, isolated successes with mirror treatment. In Bath, England, several patients suffering from what is called complex regional pain syndrome, severe, disabling limb sensations of unknown cause, were reported to have experienced complete resolution after six weeks of mirror therapy.
Such findings open up a fascinating prospect: perhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car's dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can not find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. . . "
The basic idea is that the brain's sensory understanding of the external world sometimes follows a 'best guess' approach, which is why we can see a dog walking behind a fence and understand it to be a dog, etc. And sometimes if nerves have been or are (partially) damage, the brain puts together a "best guess." This mirror approach is a way of giving the brain a different best guess.
30 Jul 2012, 2:05 pm
