Successful treatment for phantom pain.

This article reports a series of 31 patients with true phantom pain. Mexiletine was used in an open-label study to evaluate its effectiveness in the treatment of this disorder. Eighteen of these patients had good to excellent results with mexiletine alone. Eleven other patients responded favorably with a combination of mexiletine and clonidine. Two patients did not respond to either drug alone or in combination. Three patients elected to discontinue use of the mexiletine because of persistent nausea, even at low doses.