More than 80% of individuals who have lost a limb—over a million people in the U.S.—report phantom limb pain. Many of them are combat veterans. For most of those who struggle with this condition, phantom limb pain is often intense and experienced daily, even though the tissue, cells, and pain receptors are absent.

In her Energy Medicine book, Donna recounts how she helped a veteran who was still suffering from unbearable pain long after he lost both legs when he stepped on a land mine in Vietnam. The pain he felt was coming from where his legs had been.

Painkillers hadn’t helped this man, although, for a period, he had become addicted to them. He broke the addiction but was still often in agony. That is when he came in a wheelchair, grasping at straws, no doubt, to have a session with Donna. She could see the energy field that was still there where his legs had been as if the energy was the infrastructure of the physical limbs.

No More Pain

These energies were severely contorted, particularly along his bladder, kidney, and liver meridians. Donna held balancing points in the area of the missing leg that she believed would correct the energy imbalances, just as if she were working with a physical leg. The man and his partner looked on with some amazement since all they could see was that she was touching thin air. But within a few minutes, his discomfort went from intense to no pain.

Donna taught the partner how to hold the points and invited them to return if needed. They called to say it was working: no pain. Whenever any unpleasant sensations arose, the points were held, and the pain abated. Donna has had several similar experiences.


Attuning to Invisible Limbs

Other practitioners have had comparable outcomes. Titanya Dahlin reports success using EEM techniques for phantom pain with a friend whose toes had been amputated due to diabetes.

Wilma Moen, an EEM practitioner, wrote to us that her “brother-in-law had his right leg amputated from the knee down. We used the Brazilian Toe Technique [an acupressure procedure]. It gave him relief from his phantom pain. We did it a couple times a day. If he missed it, he would feel the pain coming back. He told everyone he knew about it.”

The Brazilian Toe Technique involves holding acupressure points that are at meridian end points on the toes. This page shows how to carry out the procedure. Doing it with a phantom limb requires that the practitioner be attuned to the energies that still exist where the toes had been, but learning the approach provides a map for finding the points. You can also adapt the instructions to the fingers instead of the toes if an arm is the missing limb.

Calling All Energy Healing Practitioners

To learn more about phantom limb pain, this post on the blog of our sister organization, The Institute of Noetic Sciences, is quite interesting. Written by our friend and colleague Rupert Sheldrake, it also includes AN INVITATION TO ENERGY HEALING PRACTITIONERS to participate in an experiment demonstrating the energies involved with phantom limb phenomena.

Finally, helping veterans with phantom limb pain could be a great specialty area for energy medicine practitioners. Veterans organizations know of people who suffer with phantom pain. A way to turn this into a specialty would be to start by contacting a local veterans group, sending Donna’s stories from the Energy Medicine book, and offering a free session to someone they can connect you with.

If you could get even one strong testimonial, you could use it, combined with Donna’s cases from the Energy Medicine book, to establish yourself as a resource in this area.

How You Can Help

Even though more than a million people in the U.S. still suffer from phantom limb pain 2 years after the loss of their limb, no effective established treatments are available. It would be a great service if our practitioners were to step in and offer one! People suffering with this condition are strongly motivated to get help.

If you do feel called to help veterans in this manner, Diana Czekalski, an EEM Certified Practitioner, has been teaching energy medicine to veterans in Veteran Alliance hospitals and at veteran events, and she is also working with some as private clients. But getting into the veteran community can be challenging.

Diana has written some guidelines for working with veterans and veteran organizations, and you can get them from our EEM Research Coordinator, Alexie Bennett, at [email protected].