Part of this exercise included watching two videos that illustrate visual therapies intended to help patients with phantom limb pain experience a reduction in reported levels of pain. Based on your experience reviewing the content of these videos, which of the following is TRUE?
These visual therapies are experimental at this stage, and have not yet demonstrated clinical application to justify their use with real a real population of patients.
The success of mirror therapy hinges on how well a patient can draw their missing limb while viewing a reflection of their intact limb to use as a model.
Virtual Reality (VR) therapies work by having a patient successfully execute a series of movements following a “script” they must write themselves, thus retraining their brain to anticipate movements using their phantom limb, overriding the pain signals.
The visual therapies depicted appear to be successful, at least in part, because the visual input patients receive “tricks” the brain into perceiving the missing limb as intact, and this appears to override the proprioceptive input from the missing limb.
