Listen to an amputee describe what it was like in the aftermath of his partial foot amputation and how his chronic, extreme pain fueled his depression and his decision to attempt to alleviate the pain with the radical surgery.

Hear about life as an amputee and how mirror box therapy helped.

Palliative care physician BJ Miller describes his phantom limb pain and itching after losing both legs and half an arm in an accident. Mirror box therapy eventually helped him, alongside physical therapy. This podcast also features neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran who explains how he developed mirror box therapy in the 1990s.

Hear Aristotle Domingo, a bilateral amputee athlete, discuss his amputation journey.

Listen to how bionic limbs are reshaping what it means to live as an amputee in this award-winning 2022 podcast series covering the stories of two amputees who struggled with shortcomings in prosthetic technology.

See what analysis of one man's amputated leg, donated to The Bone Museum, tells us about his otherwise invisible pain.

Learn how a doctor successfully treated a patient's phantom limb pain with a mirror, tricking his brain into thinking his still-present arm was the missing paralyzed left one.

Phantom limb pain may often match the pain or contortion of the injury that led to the limb loss.

Losing a brain-computer interface can trigger lasting psychological distress

A clinical trial participant with severe epilepsy described becoming “one” with her implant after it gave her unprecedented control over her seizures. When the device was removed due to the company shutting down, she experienced deep emotional trauma and a sense of personal loss.

Non-amputees can be tricked into thinking they have phantom limbs with rubber arm experiments.

Doctors ignored women's pain as a nurse replaced their fentanyl with saline

This five-part podcast series, produced by Serial Productions, focuses on the experiences of women undergoing fertility treatments at a Yale clinic where a nurse secretly replaced pain medication with saline solution. This led to women experiencing excruciating pain during procedures, but the clinic downplayed or ignored their complaints.

Listen to why extensive ear rinsing can create problems

The clinician who hosts this podcast discusses how his patient developed swimmer's ear after he flooded his ears with water during his daily showers, ostensibly to clean them. The resulting itchy, painful ears were the result of removing protective earwax in the ear and also altering the typical pH of the ear.

Listen to how gaps in schizophrenia care helped to lead to a murder

Michael Laudor attended Yale, succumbed to schizophrenia, and killed his pregnant fiancée. The podcast, which includes a long but moving interview with Laudor's friend Jonathan Rosen, uses the tragedy to frame how America's approach to severe mental illness has fallen short.

Readers thought the fictional Civil War vet George Dedlow, a character suffering from phantom limb pain in an 1866 story in The Atlantic, was real—and sent donations and stopped by the hospital to meet him.

A first-person account of receiving an Alzheimer's diagnosis

Having Alzheimer's is a bit like having a part of your brain sliced away each day, according to author Greg O'Brien. This 34-minute podcast episode introduces O'Brien and his co-host, author David Shenk, as the two embark on a multi-season conversation on Alzheimer's disease and O'Brien's diagnosis.

Using psychedelics to manage a cancer diagnosis

Dr. Roland Griffiths helped lead the revival of psychedelic research, often prescribing the use of psilocybin to address severe depression or anxiety in patients. This podcast explores how Griffiths leaned on his own career after being diagnosed with cancer and facing the prospect of death.

Learn about the point of the physical and emotional experience of pain, which has three broad categories that help determine treatment approaches.

Recent research found that the brain doesn't seem to massively rewire following amputation—upending earlier beliefs about the cause of phantom limb pain.

Black patients are losing their limbs at a rate triple that of other groups due in large part to inequities in diabetes care and management.

Amputees must navigate the challenging medical and economic aspects of limb support and replacement, but advances in technology and research may reduce these costs.

Phantom limbs aren't just limited to limbs—there are phantom breasts, teeth, and more, and these sensations are often painful.

The subjectivity of pain means that one person's kidney stones may be another's childbirth, but most sources of pain do have objective, underlying causes.

Explore the biology of pain and why the experience of pain may differ widely from one person to another.

An avowed rationalist discusses his near-death experience

Documentarian Sebastian Junger, a veteran reporter and skeptic discusses his experiences—in particular, a frightening vision—after an aneurysm and internal hemorrhaging left him nearly dead. Junger talks about his NDE, the possible scientific explanations, and how that day changed his fundamental worldview.

Wearing a 'schizophrenia simulator,' designed to build empathy for patients, CNN's Anderson Cooper finds he struggles to function

Donning headphones that play a track mimicking the auditory hallucinations common in schizophrenia, Cooper finds he is very distracted, disconcerted, and frustrated. The auditory track aims to help listeners build empathy with patient populations by understanding the challenges they face in daily life.

Listen to what it was like living as a medieval leper

This podcast uses paleopathological and anthropological findings to reconstruct what it was like for people diagnosed with leprosy in medieval times on the Eurasian continent. If a town lacked a leprosarium—an isolated leper asylum or colony—or the suspected leper was a foreigner or a Jew, which would make them ineligible for leprosarium admission, they'd be expelled.

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers performed amputations and appear to have provided post-op care, according to analysis of a recent fossil discovery from almost 31,000 years ago.