Hi there. I usually participate in the RSD territory but have been working outside the box for a little while now, to the point that I flew to Baltimore from LA a couple of weeks ago in hopes of getting a complete pro-inflammatory cytokine workup at Hopkins.

No luck, notwithstanding my neurologist letter of referral and a secondary referral from a rheumatologist at the Mayo Clinic. My file got passed to a very junior neurologist, who would have told me there was no point in coming, but the letter of referral to the allergist/clinical immunologist with whom I made the initial point of contact never made it to her. She came up with the name however of one lab that's testing for high levels of Interluekin 6, a cytokine that's been found in significantly elevated amounts the CSF of CRPS/RSD patients and to be the single most probative indicators of death from cardiac artery disease. (References available upon request.)

It's like I showed up at least a year before they're ready to allow clinical patients access to cytokine testing, that is outside of tightly established research protocols for drugs the would counter Il-6 for people with RA and Crohn's Disease. I was however advised that although my levels of I-6 would almost surely be elevated, where I had a small heart attack a couple of years before, three years after getting RSD, there was no assurance that just because a condition was associated with high levels of IL-6 there was no assurance that it could reverse the malady and secondly, and I had heard this warning earlier, there's a real risk with some of the drugs being associated with non-trivial infections, e.g. meningitis.

I'm not sure what all of this means to me, but I now know there are at least three medications in Phase III trials for the treatment of RA and Crohn's, on account of which one or more of then become generally available within maybe a years or so, assuming they survive scrutiny for side-effects.

So with that, hello.

Mike