The Mirror Man: Treating Phantom Limb Pain With a Simple Technology

>In 2008, Stephen was working as a property manager in south Baja, Mexico, when he had a particularly agonizing bout of phantom pain. “I was not presentable for 72 hours,” he says. He was aware of mirror therapy from having looked online for treatments, and he decided to give it a try. He got into his truck and drove two-and-a-half hours to the nearest Home Depot to buy a mirror. He tried it right there in the parking lot, and in five minutes the pain was gone.

>Stephen used the mirror for two weeks, then stopped because the pain had not returned. About a year and a half later, he felt the pain again, and this time he stayed the course for the full five weeks. He hasn’t had phantom pain for over four years. “It’s gone now,” he says. “It’s gone because I treated myself with a mirror.”

The patient arranges a mirror to show a healthy limb as if it were the phantom. They can then "move" the phantom limb [by actually moving the surviving healthy limb].

I recall reading of experiments with healthy subjects where an arrangement convinced them that a model was their limb, the limb was injured and they felt pain - something along those lines, seems similar to how this works.

Ramachandran's ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind