Do you ever notice that when your distracted from pain you tend to feel a bit less? Maybe you went on vacation and felt a little less pain than before. Florida pain management physician, Dr. Pyles, suggests some fun to take you mind off of the stress that chronic pain can bring. It’s quite remarkable how our brain processes pain, and how effective distraction can be.
Austrailian hospitals are using a remarkable new treatment that effectively tricks the brain of an injured patient into thinking their problem has deteriorated or gone away.
Austin Health physiotherapist Anne Daly said the technique, which involves the use of mirrors, was helping patients recover from Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a grueling condition that causes unrelenting pain in a person’s limb, usually after they have suffered an injury.
She said research showed that getting patients with the syndrome to practice exercises with both their non-affected and affected limbs while looking in a mirror had helped to reprogram the cause of their syndrome deep within their brains. – BrisbaneTimes.com
This new mirror technique of pain management has been shown to significantly reduce pain in “around a third of the patients” that uses this as a form of chronic pain treatment. The therapy is also used for patients who have lost limbs and suffer from “phantom limb pain” where the brain sends faulty signals to a limb that is no longer there.