Transcription
As I've said before, there's certain pain conditions that I really have a passion about. And one of the conditions I have a passion about is reflex sympathetic distrophe or complex regional pain syndrome. That's actually the pain syndrome that got me interested in pain management.
So, as a resident, I would collect articles on reflex sympathetic distrophe. And I just always thought that everybody was missing something, you know, cuz you I mean, that is just a very disabling condition. And some people think it's the most painful pain condition to the point where recently I wrote an article on it. So I'd really encourage people to read that article which was published in the journal of prolotherapy and I really cover that condition very thoroughly.
But just in general, what I think happens with probably half of the cases of complex regional pain syndrome is that they have an injury to the hand or the foot and have a long period of immobility, whether it's because they were placed in a cast or a boot or somebody thought just resting the joint would u be helpful for them. The problem with that is is even if they've had a fracture, let's be honest, if you fractured your hand or your foot or you had a big trauma to those areas, well, you probably injured some ligaments. And all one has to do is research ligament healing and immobility. And you'll see that immobility is the very worst thing for ligaments because ligaments have a terrible blood supply. And if you start immobilizing a ligament, it's going to get weaker, weaker, weaker. I mean, very, very quickly.
So I think that probably about half of the cases of reflex sympathetic distrophe or chronic or complex regional pain syndrome is because of ligament injury and it's actually the ligaments that are perpetuating the syndrome. Now that isn't the only thing we would do. We wouldn't just do prolotherapy for those conditions because typically by the time I see them they've had pain for you know years. They've had the condition for years. So there's endocrinocrine problems, there's range of motion problems, there's bone density problems, you know, there's life issues, you know, marriage issues, financial issues. So you really have to deal with all of them. And I think Caring Medical in Oak Park, Illinois does a great job.
So prolotherapy is definitely a part of it and it works very very good for uh complex regional pain syndrome reflex sympathetic distrophe but combined with addressing all the issues the health issues the pain issues and also you have to get off of narcotics. Narcotics inhibit healing. So part of the challenge with folks like that is because they generally come on very high dose narcotics is giving them pain relief while they're getting prolotherapy. But prolotherapy works very very good. I'm not going to say that it's a it's quick fix. I mean, it normally takes a year, you know, but we've had very good success with it.
In in the books that we wrote like Prolo Your Pain Away, we absolutely put uh reflex sympathetic distrophe in it. We wrote a very comp uh thorough article on it. So, I feel like, you know, we're uh especially myself and the office here, we're very skilled at treating reflex sympathetic distrophies. So, I'd really encourage folks to consider uh us if they have that.