What is phantom pain?

The meaning of phantom according to English dictionary is related to paranormal, ghosts and mental illusion.
Phantom pain is a very bizarre phenomenon of mind in which we feel pain in the body organ that we don’t have or the pain in phantom limb!
Phantom pain is a subject of neuroscience and philosophy of consciousness.
Phantom limb is a sensation of a person in which he fells that his amputed limb is still attached with his body.

Phantom sensation is caused when some ones limb or any body part is removed after a surgery and also due to nerves or spinal cord is injured. In some of the phantom sensation we just fell that our amputated body part is still attached with our body, in some cases we fell itching or uneasiness and in some cases we fell a pain in the body part that we don’t have which causes phantom pain.
Usually phantom pain is very painful and mentally torturing!
In rural and undeveloped places peoples even regard this as a paranormal activity of ghosts and spirits.

So why is phantom pain caused?

There is not a single and best theory which describes why is it caused till now. But the most effective one to describe this phenomenon is that even after our limb or body organ is removed the nerves in our spinal cord and body attached to them are not damaged. So our mind still tries to communicate with those body organs, to communicate our mind sends electrical signal to the related nerves. But as the organ is not there mind doesn’t gets the feed back or reply to the signal. And our mind then sends more powerful signals and the process goes on and on till we fell pain or uneasy.

and how can we cure phantom pain?

There are many ways to cure phantom pain. We can simply do messaging, meditation but these ways to cure have a very less success ratio usually less than 40%.
We can also use electrical stimulation or medicinal therapy to
re it but it also don’t gives us a better result..
We can also use deep brain stimulation in which we determine which part of our brain is causing the pain with the help of brain imaging technology and we implant electrodes in our brain to stop the pain.

Another very prominent way to cure phantom pain is the “mirror box” therapy In this therapy we try to send a visual feed back to brain due to which it feels that limb is there and working so that it stops sending the strong signals to nerves. To do this we make a small box with a mirror which partitions the box in two part and we put our one hand in one side and move it so that we see that both of our hand are moving one in mirror and one our hand.

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1 Comments

subash says:

November 7, 2009 at 4:58 am

Phantom pain is the field in science where very few of scientists are working!
Waiting for your replies.

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