Mirrors as Medicine

In the June 30, 2008, issue of the magazine, Atul Gawande wrote about the use of mirror therapy to solve cases of phantom-limb pain and unresolvable itching. Since then, a reader of the magazine has successfully used this technique to combat his anesthesia dolorosa, a condition involving the continuing sensation of pain in the face, even though the area is numb. His wife has posted their extraordinary story—including a visual demonstration of how they employed mirror therapy—on their blog. As Beth Taylor-Schott writes: >

Using the information from the article, we came up with a non-reversed mirror therapy to try to reduce David’s AD-related pain. I will describe how we did it in later postings. For now, I will give a sense of the big picture. We started doing the therapy on the 23rd of July, 2008. Within 2-3 days, his pain was down to zero, and as long as we continued to do the mirror therapy 3-4 times a day, it remained that low. This was the lowest it had been since he had had the sympathetic nerve blocks, and it stayed low for much longer periods of time than it had after the blocks.

In another entry she writes, “this is nothing short of a miracle.”