Lori Lee

I called his office a while back to see if I could get an appointment. For new patients, the wait for an initial appointment with Dr S. is between 18 months and three years. It makes the UK's NHS look positively efficient and 21st century!!!

You also need to bear in mind that the ketamine infusion treatment is still in its relative infancy. It is regarded as experimental and has been carried out on very small numbers of people (in relative terms).

I am not suggesting in any way that you shouldn't continue to pursue either an appointment with Dr. S or the ketamine infusion treatments. I would urge you though to be realistic or you risk building up your hopes and possibly then having to cope with having them painfully shattered further down the line. I know it feels awful but you are only at the very beginning of the CRPS journey. Most physicians and insurers will want to try the conventional treatments to see how you respond to those before they would start to look at the more "experimental" and expensive stuff. Although there are no published statistics, the pain and other symptoms do subside for some people given time, drugs and physio. None of the ketamine based treatment is available in the UK even as part of a research project and it is not an option to travel to the US to have it done because it requires regular repeat infusions and boosters on an ongoing, long-term basis.

When you are feeling desperate it is very easy to pin all of your hopes on the latest experimental procedure or an appointment with a well known specialist. Pursue all of this but don't use this activity as a substitute for coming to terms with the diagnosis and your current situation. You might have to wait quite a long time and in the meantime you will still need to learn to cope and manage your situation on both a physical and psychological level.

Good luck though. If you look at the rsds.org website you will find lots of info about ketamine based treatments and the names of the physicians and academic clinicians who are carrying these various treatments out.