{"id":1205,"date":"2009-08-19T00:57:57","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T04:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/?p=1205"},"modified":"2016-11-14T18:42:47","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T22:42:47","slug":"exercising-phantom-limb-decreases-phantom-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/1205\/exercising-phantom-limb-decreases-phantom-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"Exercise Your Phantom Limb To Decrease Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What can you do if you have\u00a0pain in a\u00a0part of your body that <em>is no longer there <\/em>&#8211; in other words, phantom pain? Unfortunately, phantom sensations are fairly common after amputation or trauma, but previously, treatment was not very effective.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"leg showing common phantom sensations\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bfe.org\/protocol\/figfive1.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"187\" height=\"212\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at UCSD,\u00a0made a breakthrough by suggesting that patients &#8220;trick&#8221; their brains into thinking they are exercising the missing body part. He did this by using a mirror to have patients look at\u00a0a reflection of the normal body part to make it seem like the phantom limb was still there and moving. It worked to decrease unpleasant sensations and pain!<\/p>\n<p>A new study by Ugler expands on this work and shows that <strong>phantom exercises help decrease pain<\/strong> in patients with traumatic amputations and phantom limb pain. Although a small study, the researchers showed that &#8220;exercising&#8221; the phantom limb results in better pain relief than just general exercise.<\/p>\n<p>Ugler had patients do the same movement with both their intact limb and the amputated area. Let&#8217;s say someone had his\u00a0left arm amputated and had phantom pain in his left hand. The patient would move\u00a0his right hand, and imagine moving\u00a0his left (amputated) hand in the same ways. It was found that this would decrease pain.<\/p>\n<p>Ugler hypothesized that several factors may be helping, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>exercise and movement of the remaining portion of the limb<\/li>\n<li>visually watching normal movement of the opposite (intact) limb<\/li>\n<li>seeing and using a prosthetic limb may visually give normalizing signals to the brain<\/li>\n<li>a relaxation effect following\u00a0movement of the amputated limb<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The theory behind this type of treatment, as well as mirror therapy, is that the problem is primarily in the brain, not the site where the pain is felt. By re-training the brain, the brain error is reduced, and the pain decreases. It&#8217;s encouraging that further work in this exciting area of treatment is occurring!<\/p>\n<p>The full study is in the <em>Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine<\/em>, June 2009, Volume 41,\u00a0pages 582-584.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What can you do if you have\u00a0pain in a\u00a0part of your body that is no longer there &#8211; in other words, phantom pain? Unfortunately, phantom sensations are fairly common after amputation or trauma, but previously, treatment was not very effective. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at UCSD,\u00a0made a breakthrough by suggesting that patients &#8220;trick&#8221; their brains into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1205"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7656,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1205\/revisions\/7656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}