Mirror Visual Therapy

I had my first physio appointment today with the special physio, she is lovely and I wish she wasn’t so far away from where I study. Its almost strange after so long of getting nowhere, to be getting help from people who really understand what its like to have CRPS.

She started mirror visual therapy with me this morning, something I had never heard of till last Saturday. What you do is rather than stand in front of the mirror, you sit (on a chair or the floor) with the mirror sideways, with the back of the mirror to your bad foot side and the mirror facing your good leg. When you look in the mirror you see your good leg but it is in place of you bad leg.

I then move my good foot and my brain thinks its my bad foot moving. I did simple plantarflexion and dorsiflexion and that felt fine and then I did some inversion and eversion but that made my bad foot hurt even though it wasn’t moving at all! Straight away we stopped that and did flexion again till it calmed down. After a bit we tried simulating walking movement till it brought on pain and then went back to flexion again which calmed the pain down again.

It was so fascinating how I could increase and then decrease pain in my right injured foot by watching my uninjured left foot move in a mirror…how does that exactly work? The brain is a very complex interesting thing.
The plan is to be able to gradually start to do the movements with my CRPS foot and have a way of calming any pain but I think I am a way off that yet but this is very exciting!

I also have a TENS unit to use to also help with the pain, I am to increase my usage by an hour a day till I reach about 8 hours. This is also hopefully going to help with managing my pain better. I hope it does!