Littlepaw is right, the whole concept of stages in CRPS is an outdated concept that has been abandoned. I've had CRPS for more than 8 years and it was discredited as a concept several years before I developed it. Its been medically demonstrated a number of times that the stages don't exist. The only distinction made nowadays is between acute and chronic CRPS - that has nothing to do with symptoms or changes and is purely defined by reference to the time that has passed since diagnosis or onset.

People have different signs and symptoms at different times and everyone's progression is different. Currently, the key requirement for a CRPS diagnosis is to meet the Budapest Criteria - if you don't meet the criteria, you don't have it. That particular diagnostic tool takes account of the inherent changes in signs and symptoms over time.

I use any reference to 'stages' as one of my personal tests of how good and/or up-to-date a doctor or other medical professional's knowledge of the condition really is. Any doctor, physio or 'other' who mentions stages is massively out of date and clearly doesn't actually know anything relevant about the condition. Nobody professing to be an expert in the condition should be referring to stages. In fact, nobody in the healthcare sector professing to have any knowledge of the condition should be referring to stages or suggesting they are still considered to be relevant.

CRPS doesn't spread to other limbs in everyone. Depending on whose evidence you accept, the majority of the experts' opinions are that it spreads in only a minority of cases. Its very easy to forget that the people posting on this forum are a very small subset of the CRPS population who are almost inevitably the people with more refractive, more complex conditions. The people with relatively minor CRPS symptoms and/or those who achieve remission are generally out there just getting on with their virtually normal lives rather than seeking information from this kind of online support community.