Facilitation of Sensory and Motor Recovery by Thermal Intervention for the Hemiplegic Upper Limb in Acute Stroke Patients

I had mentioned this in a number of my posts but the link is gone and it needed its own post because it is so important that all your therapists should have told you about this already.  Didn't they?
They've had 7 years to get up-to-date.
http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/36/12/2665.full
The pertinent paragraph here:

Intervention

Patients comfortably sat in a quiet room with their hands placed on a table. Temperatures of room and subjects’ hands were noted before experiment. Thermal agent was made by general hot (≈75°C) or cold (0°C) pack wrapped with 2 towels, which buffered the thermal conduction. The thermal agent was placed over the region of the hand and wrist. A thermal couple was placed in between the hand and thermal agent to measure the skin temperature. Changes of the skin temperature induced by thermal agents were nonlinear. In our pilot study (n=30), uncomfortable signs to heating and cooling agents occurred at 10.1±1.0 seconds (44.3±0.2°C) and 15.1±1.2 seconds (18.8±0.3°C), respectively. To avoid tissue damage, ceiling durations of heating and cooling stimulation on the paretic hand were limited by 15 seconds (48.8±0.3°C) and 30 seconds (14.0±0.2°C), respectively. During the development of uncomfortable sensation, patients were encouraged to actively move their paretic hands away from the stimuli or generated a reflex. Thus, the thermal agent could produce thermal sensation followed by voluntary/reflexive behavior. 

This is obviously very dangerous so no self-prescription or self-therapy without your doctors approval.