The lived complexity of phantom limb telescoping: insights from a qualitative study.
Andrea Aternali, Heather Lumsden-Ruegg, Nicole Dimitrova and 4 others
Twelve amputees described phantom limb shortening as strange but not painful.
Most had never mentioned it to a clinician, and one was told it was imagined. Asking about this sensation and normalizing it may reduce patients' sense of being alone with it.
Key findings
1Most participants described telescoping as an unusual but non-distressing sensation, often overshadowed by phantom limb pain and the broader adjustment to limb loss rather than being a source of worry in its own right.
2Several participants had never told a medical professional about telescoping, and at least one was told by a chiropodist that the sensation was 'made-up or invented'; the paper notes that clinicians did not typically ask about it.
3The onset of telescoping varied from immediately after amputation to 12 years later, and the way it was perceived differed greatly between individuals, from a few inches shorter to the phantom limb retracting completely into the residual limb.
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What it does not show
Twelve participants, eleven of whom were men, limits how far the findings can be generalised, particularly to women and to people from different cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds. All participants were recruited from a single rehabilitation centre in Toronto with access to post-amputation health services, so the experience of someone without that support is not represented. Coding and theme development were led by one researcher; although a second coder reviewed three transcripts, the interpretive process remains subjective and not fully reproducible. Participants were asked to recall when telescoping first appeared, and for some this was more than six years after amputation, so timing details may be unreliable. Anxiety and depression were not directly assessed in this study, even though the authors reference other work linking telescoping to higher levels of both. Transcripts were not returned to participants for comment or correction, and participants were not consulted on the findings.
Declared interests
Funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Canada Graduate Doctoral Award (A.A.), a CIHR Canada Research Chair in Health Psychology (J.K.), and a grant from The War Amps to J.K. No industry funding or conflicts of interest were declared.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →