Dear Lorreta -

I wish I could have gotten rid if my RSD. Alas, I've just sort of learned to live with it. There have been a few times along the way when I thought I was about to get a major new treatment, only for it not to pan out at the end, whether it was a ketamine coma in Germany (disqualified with less than 2 weeks to go because of pre-existing glaucoma) or more recent electroconvulsive therapy - using ketamine as the general anesthetic - which my doctors were willing to do but the psychiatry dept. at their hospital/medical school is now requiring be it approved as a formal invetigative study by medical school's institutional review board, something that will take another year at least.

What "saved me" was getting into a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class that combined meditation and yoga with a sense of general acceptance for just what was going on in the body. Not acceptance in the sense of anything fatalistic, but just learning how to pick your battles, and not struggle with pain that's just going to be there anyhow: you either take something for it or you let it flow through you. In the words of my teacher Shinzen Young, suffering equals pain times resistance. Sometimes you can't do anything about the pain, but resistance is always under your control. Jules put up a nice post about Shinzen and his book, Break Through Pain, the other day, the sixth item in this thread: http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/thread54819.html

Finally, you asked how I got RSD. In a fit of self improvement I went to the gym and hired a personal trainer, in an attempt to have more focus in the office. Long story short, he put me on some equiptment (1) I never would have chosen for myself and (2) people with flat feet had no busniess being on. I ripped tendons in both ankles and that was that. Now, I should say that at the time there was a lot of stress in my life, and there's some evidence that there is a greater chance of developing RSD when folks are injured who are already under significant stress, whatever the immediate tauma happens to be. I know a few people on this forum for whom that was their experience. (And there's another aspect of the RSD/inflamation puzzle.)

Mike