Emily Anderson- phantom limb pain relief

     Recently, a neuroscientist named Dr. Seymour from the United Kingdom and a Japanese group led by Takufumi Yanagisawa collaborated to find a different treatment plan for patients who suffer from phantom limb pain. Phantom limb pain is when a limb is amputated for whatever reason and the patient seems to feel pain in that nonexistent limb. Most approaches for pain would be to treat it with pain killers; however, regular pain killers does not work on phantom limb patients. This pain is said to come from the sensorimotor cortex of your brain because that's the part of your brain that deals with the mapping out of the sensory neurons in your body. When one of your limbs is absent from this map, your brain gets confused because something is off which most likely causes pain in your amputated limb. First, they made patients in their study think about moving their nonexistent limb in attempt to move the prosthetic limb instead. This, unfortunately, only worsened their pain. They decided to take a different approach using the opposite side of the brain. For example, if the patient had lost their left hand, they would focus on movements associated with their right hand to move their prosthetic one. This reverse technique was found to decrease the patients' pain.
     I'm very happy that they have started finding some ways to treat this pain in an effective way. The amount of amputees in America (2 million) definitely relates to American soldiers, fighting for their country in recent wars, losing limbs. According to data released in 2012, one thousand five hundred Americans have lost a limb fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. This of course contributes to the number of amputees in the United States. The treatments they have started are years away from being easily accessible, but in the future they hope to make this pain relief attainable for all patients suffering from phantom limb pain.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313729.php