Originally published November 10 2005
Mirror therapy being developed to aid persistent pain sufferers
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Researchers from the University of Bath and the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases (RNHRD) are developing a treatment for patients suffering from persistent pain that uses mirrors to correct faulty brain images of the pain source.
The treatment, being developed by researchers from the University of Bath and the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases (RNHRD), is based on a new theory about how people experience pain even when doctors can find no direct cause.
This 'cortical' model of pain suggests that the brain's image of the body can become faulty, resulting in a mismatch between the brain's movement control systems and its sensory systems, causing a person to experience pain when they move a particular hand, foot or limb.
In an investigation of whether this system can be corrected using mirrors to trick the brain, researchers asked a number of patients with complex regional pain syndrome (a chronic debilitating condition affecting 10,000 -- 20,000 patients in the UK at any one time) to carry out routine exercises in front of a mirror.
"In missing that bottom step, you jar the prediction that your brain had made about what was going to happen, triggering an alert to the body that things are not as you expected, hence the feeling of surprise.
"This is because in most cases normal awareness and experience of our limbs is often based on the predicted state rather than the actual state.
"When the two do not match we think sensations are generated to alert the body that things are not as it thought -- rather like an early warning mechanism.
They asked 41 healthy people to sit with a mirror at right angles in front of them so that they could only see one side of their body at a time.
The volunteers were then asked to move their limbs in the same direction at the same time, and then in opposite directions whilst viewing the mirror reflection of one hand.
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