andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-457 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: OK, here’s something that is completely baffling me. I read this article by John Colapinto on the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who’s famous for his innovative treatment for “phantom limb” pain: His first subject was a young man who a decade earlier had crashed his motorcycle and torn from his spinal column the nerves supplying the left arm. After keeping the useless arm in a sling for a year, the man had the arm amputated above the elbow. Ever since, he had felt unremitting cramping in the phantom limb, as though it were immobilized in an awkward position. . . . Ramachandram positioned a twenty-inch-by-twenty-inch drugstore mirror . . . and told him to place his intact right arm on one side of the mirror and his stump on the other. He told the man to arrange the mirror so that the reflection created the illusion that his intact arm was the continuation of the amputated one. The Ramachandran asked the man to move his right and left arms . . . “Oh, my God!” the man began
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1 Ramachandran, who’s famous for his innovative treatment for “phantom limb” pain: His first subject was a young man who a decade earlier had crashed his motorcycle and torn from his spinal column the nerves supplying the left arm. [sent-4, score-0.22]
2 After keeping the useless arm in a sling for a year, the man had the arm amputated above the elbow. [sent-5, score-0.435]
3 Ever since, he had felt unremitting cramping in the phantom limb, as though it were immobilized in an awkward position. [sent-6, score-0.344]
4 and told him to place his intact right arm on one side of the mirror and his stump on the other. [sent-13, score-0.648]
5 He told the man to arrange the mirror so that the reflection created the illusion that his intact arm was the continuation of the amputated one. [sent-14, score-0.92]
6 The Ramachandran asked the man to move his right and left arms . [sent-15, score-0.207]
7 For the first time in ten years, the patient could feel his phantom limb “moving,” and the cramping pain was instantly relieved. [sent-23, score-0.841]
8 After the man had used the mirror therapy ten minutes a day for a month, his phantom limb shrank . [sent-24, score-1.413]
9 In all but one patient, phantom hands that had been balled into painful fists opened, and phantom arms that had stiffened into agonizing contortions straightened. [sent-28, score-0.656]
10 read Ramachandran’s Nature paper on mirror therapy for phantom-limb pain. [sent-39, score-0.763]
11 Several years later, in 2004, Tsao began working at Walter Reed Military Hospital, where he saw hundreds of soldiers with amputations returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. [sent-43, score-0.331]
12 Ninety percent of them had phantom-limb pain, and Tsao, noting that the painkillers routinely prescribed for the condition were ineffective, suggested mirror therapy. [sent-44, score-0.855]
13 the six who used the mirror reported that their pain decreased [with no corresponding improvement in the control groups] . [sent-49, score-0.634]
14 “The people who really got completely pain-free remain so, two years later,” said Tsao, who is currently conducting a study involving mirror therapy on upper-limb amputees at Walter Reed. [sent-53, score-1.07]
15 Why did his mirror therapy not become the standard approach, especially given that “the painkillers routinely prescribed for the condition were ineffective”? [sent-61, score-1.16]
16 Why were these ineffective painkillers “routinely prescribed” at all? [sent-62, score-0.268]
17 When Tsao finally got around to trying a therapy that had been published nine years before why did they have “a lot of skepticism from the people at the hospital”? [sent-64, score-0.463]
18 If Tsao saw “hundreds of soldiers” with phantom-limb pain, why did he try the already-published mirror therapy on only 18 of them? [sent-66, score-0.763]
19 How come, in 2009, two years after his paper in the New England Journal of Medicine–and fourteen years after Ramachandran’s original paper in Nature–even now, Tsao is “currently conducting a study involving mirror therapy”? [sent-68, score-0.725]
20 Ok, maybe I have the answer to the last question: Maybe Tsao’s current (as of 2009) study is of different variants of mirror therapy. [sent-70, score-0.458]
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