Phantom pain is very annoying and the cause is bad enough. You can already suffer from phantom pain if your dentist accidentally pulls a healthy molar. However, phantom limb pain is best known from pain in your limb or finger that has been amputated and can't actually have any pain at all. Still, this is reality and a confusing and annoying problem because you can't really scratch that itch away.
Therefore, in this article, I discuss how hypnosis can help combat phantom limb pain.
Usually the feeling in the amputated limb goes away on its own, but you may still feel like it's there for a few months. However, if that feeling and the pain that sometimes comes with it is not gone after six months, it becomes difficult to still get rid of it.
In addition to pain, you can also feel heat, cold, itching, cramping and tingling.
Phantom pain cause
Phantom pain is actually very strange. You're missing a part of your body and yet you feel like it's still there. You can sometimes feel like you're stubbing your toe when it's not there. You would almost believe that there is more than meets the eye, but fortunately there is a logical explanation for what you feel and it all has to do with your nerves.
This is because your nerves transmit the wrong signals to your brain, which therefore gives you the idea that the limb you are missing is in pain or just still there. On the other hand, the body senses that something is wrong and sends the signal to make it clear to you that something is wrong: pain.
Your brain can also try to fill the "void. Signals they previously interpreted as something being with your hand are now used when something touches your cheek. So a hair on your cheek that causes itching may give you the feeling of itching on the hand you no longer have. Then when your cheek is touched you can also get the signal of pain because your brain has been completely confused by the missing part of your body.
Sometimes your brain retains the feeling of pain when there is no painful situation at all.
Phantom pain nerves
The way a limb is amputated can affect the degree of phantom pain. The degree of damage to the nerves, scar tissue and physical memory of the pain before amputation affect the degree of phantom pain.
For example, if you had pain in your leg due to inflammation, diabetes or from a serious accident where you could not be helped quickly enough you are more likely to have phantom pain than after an amputation where your limb did not really suffer from pain. Especially immediately after surgery, you may experience phantom pain.
If your nerves heal in a strange way or are damaged after amputation, you may also experience stump pain. This is also counted as phantom pain. In that case, always check that the prosthesis fits properly.
In the process, your nerves are normally constantly giving off signals. For example, you feel the wind blowing past your fingers, you feel your fingers pressing a keyboard, you feel yourself holding something. If these kinds of signals are missing, your brain is going to fill in these signals for you. For example, many people who are missing a hand feel that their missing hand is squeezing itself as a fist.
Normally you "update" the feeling you have continuously, but because your limb has been removed this is no longer possible.
Phantom Pain Treatment
For proper treatment for phantom pain, it is important to be able to properly formulate your symptoms to your doctor. Therefore, write down all your symptoms, including those you think are unimportant. Your doctor may think otherwise.
Also, make a list of all medications and supplements you take. Your doctor can check to see if they affect phantom pain.
Often people with phantom pain are treated with medication, such as antidepressants, but there are also treatments that do not require you to take medication.
The mirror box
The mirror box can give you the experience that your limb is still there. Inside the box is a mirror that gives you the illusion that your lost limb is still there. Then you can do symmetrical exercises, such as moving your toes and it seems like the toes of the foot you don't have are also moving. You can then imagine this as well.
Research has shown that this type of exercise can reduce your phantom pain. This may have to do with the "update" you then give to your brain. For example, if your toes were cramping at first and you "moved" them, the cramping is gone.
Hypnosis can enhance the effects of this therapy.
Due to its success with the mirror box, virtual reality developments are being closely watched for treating phantom pain.
Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy also works against phantom pain in other ways. In fact, research has shown that if you simulate and accept that the amputated leg is still there this can reduce phantom pain. So you have to create the belief , as the mirror box does, that the amputated limb is still there.
There is evidence that suggestion and expectation can affect phantom pain. For example, you can visualize the pain leaving your body.
There are two types of hypnotherapy exercises that can be used for phantom pain, visualizations and movement visualizations that mentally fulfill the mirror box exercise.
Mental Mirror Box
A case study of a 46-year-old man who was missing one hand shows that if you are already familiar with the mirror box you can produce the same effects with hypnosis. Under hypnosis, the man had to perform symmetrical exercises with his hands with his eyes closed. He had to visualize what this looked like. After the exercise, he reported that the pain on his hand was significantly reduced.
This also offers hope for applying self-hypnosis to people with phantom pain so that they can combat phantom pain at home at times when phantom pain becomes problematic.
Visualizations
A case study of a 76-year-old woman with a history of circulatory problems that required her lower leg to be amputated shows that phantom pain can sometimes occur even years after amputation. She had no pain before the amputation and it wasn't until two years later that she started experiencing phantom pain. She felt like needles were sticking into her foot, her toes were stuck in something, a kind of cutting pain in the sole of her foot and a kind of grinding pain in her ankle.
After all kinds of treatments with painkillers and nerve stimulation that had no effect, she received 25 minutes of therapy each week. Among which was hypnotherapy. As usual, hypnotherapy began with relaxation exercises. Then she had to "go to a special place" in her case this was Italy and see the beautiful marble works of art. In the second and third sessions each time she was taken to that special place and had to imagine how the artist was chopping and carving to get the picture so beautiful.
In the third session, that performance was substituted for a little artist working on her foot. Then she was told this by the hypnotherapist that, "That little artist has been working long and hard on his art now. He is tired and it is time for him to take a vacation." Later the woman reported that the pain on her ankle stopped at the same time the little man "went on vacation." In her case, not all the symptoms were gone, but a lot better. After three months, the artist was still on vacation J.
Research shows that as many as 96% of people with phantom pain benefit from hypnosis. In this study, participants were required to complete a questionnaire about their pain experience six months after hypnotherapy. In almost half of the people, the pain completely disappeared. In more than 30% of people, half the pain had diminished, and in 1 in 8 people, the pain had diminished by a quarter.
In short
Phantom pain is very annoying, and you cannot say with today's knowledge as a doctor that everything is between the ears. The communication between the body and the brain has become disrupted and stopped at the phantom limb. As a result, your brain does not get new information so it starts to "invent" signals of its own that are usually painful in nature.
To make sure your brain still gets a feeling "update," you can use the mirror box. Then you can also get hypnotherapy where the exercises performed during hypnosis are based on the mirror box.
In addition, stimulating the imagination to give a cause for the pain can be a way to be able to remove the cause, like the little artist in the above example.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then check out the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' events and trainings.
Sources:
http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/guide/phantom-limb-pain
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/phantom-pain/basics/risk-factors/con-20023268
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12061470
http://www.limbless-association.org/images/Phantom_Pain_Hypnosis.pdf
Frank Zwetsloot
on13 Mar 2016