Deck: Cyber Curmudgeon - Mirror, mirror in the box

Five years ago a stroke paralyzed my right side. My recovery has been slow and very uneven. I can walk reasonably well, for example, but I have never recovered much use of my right arm and my right hand is a paperweight.

For more than 40 years I thought with my fingers; when I lost the ability to touch type, I felt I lost my ability to think. One-handed typing is an abomination, slow and cumbersome. Voice recognition software, I use Dragon, is utterly frustrating.

A friend of mine just sent me a video of a talk given by Neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran in which he discusses a remarkable treatment for phantom pain, the pain that people who have lost an arm or leg often feel in the missing limb.

The patient is seated in front of a box containing a mirror in which the good limb is reflected. When the patient moves the good hand, say, he watches it and the mirrored reflection. The brain is fooled into thinking it is seeing both hands move.

This was tried on a man who had intolerable pain in a missing limb; it felt like his missing hand was clenched. While he watched his intact hand and the mirrored reflection move, his missing hand suddenly unclenched. After some practice with this technique, the pain went away permanently.

If this can be applied to an arm or leg or hand disabled by a stroke ...

I just ordered a mirror box from a company in England.

Say a prayer for me, wish me luck, or knock on wood.