Following amputation of a limb, paralysis, or other interruption of sensory nerves, people often feel pain. Interventions directed at the sensory input have been ineffective or have even made the pain worse; newer approaches have been directed at eliciting motor output instead. Here is the part of an article that I found most interesting:
“Evidence that stimulation of the motor cortex (the area that controls movement) can reduce phantom limb pain has been around for some time. Perhaps more surprising was a trial by Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran in 1996. They asked people with amputations of the arm and phantom limb pain to place their arms inside a mirror box so that they saw their remaining arm mirror-reversed to look like their amputated one. When they moved their remaining arm in the box they were ‘fooled’ into thinking they were moving their amputated one, and their pain was reduced. Although this has proved less effective in some subsequent trials, it did suggest that phantom limb pain might reflect a loss of motor control to the limb, as well as loss of sensory input from it.
“More recently the mirror box has been used with some success in pain that is not due to sensory loss. In fact, a box may not be required. In phantom limb pain due to a peripheral nerve injury (brachial plexopathy), Giraux and Sirigu have shown that merely training patients to imagine their paralysed arms moving in relation to a moving arm on a screen in front of them can relieve phantom limb pain.”
Presumably this imagery stimulates motor output to reorganize the cortex, reducing the pain, a strong example of how imagery can have a physiological effect.
This process is described in an article in the Economist (July 22, 2006), p 75, and is also described in a Wikipedia article.
(The link that Steve references is no longer available)
Postscript from Connirae in 2024. We now have a fascinating small group case study on some remarkable results with phantom limb pain using Wholeness Work. Read the full article here.
