The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

One of the most severe and challenging of all pains is said to be phantom limb pain, when the sufferer perceives agonies in a part of the body that has been lost to accident or amputation. It is an obvious irony that one of the greatest pains we feel can be in a part of us that is no longer there. Worse, unlike normal pain, which usually abates as a wound heals, phantom pain may go on for a lifetime. No one can yet explain why. One theory is that in the absence of receiving any signal from the nerve fibres in the missing body part, the brain interprets this as an injury so severe that the cells have died, and so sends out an unending call of distress, like a burglar alarm that won’t turn off. If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain.