Virtual Reality Eases Phantom Limb Pain
(WorldNews Denmark)

If a hand, an arm or a leg is amputated due to accident or disease, eight out of ten amputees experience a feeling of discomfort in the limb that is no longer there. The phenomenon is called phantom limb pain. Even though science has yet to come up with an unambiguous explanation, the most discussed theory concerns the sudden lack of input from the severed neural cords. `The tactile representation of different body parts are arranged in the brain in a sort of map,` explains Bo Geng, Postdoc at the Faculty of Medicine at Aalborg University in Denmark. `If the brain no longer receives feedback from an area, it tries to reprogram its signal reception map. That is the most common conception of...