I am just not sure about this article. CRPS is already formally classified as a neurological disorder in many countries including the USA. Unfortunately, neurology is a branch of medicine typified by conditions that are poorly understood at best and almost all are incurable!

There seem to be lots of these sorts of articles on CRPS at the moment - summarising what we already know but not really adding anything much that is new to the party.

It is eternally tedious and it is poor quality science when a single case study is held up as some sort of justification for a wider, proposed treatment protocol or a model to be followed for everyone.

I am sure that this girl has had a positive outcome and that is great but you only have to look around at this board and others to see that there are vast numbers of people who have tried every potential treatment listed in the article (and more) with apparently little or no effect on the progression or severity of the disease. I was diagnosed relatively early and treated fairly agressively. I have tried extrememly hard at everything I was asked to do and have manitained a calm and positive attitude to help myself but I have still ended up with severe (and progressing) movement disorder symptoms that have put me in a wheelchair and none of the therapies suggested here or elsewhere have made any difference.

We all know from the research that has been done that the girl in the case study is in an age group that has a high likelyhood of obtaining full or substantial remission from CRPS symptoms anyway.

It is great to have stories of remission and improvement to give hope. However, this article and, in my view, others from some of the particular physicians involved with RSDSA seem to keep describing the same simplistic approach over and over again which involves trying a series of these multi-modal treatments and then bingo - a bit of effort and a few months on and people are in remission or vastly better. I am pleased for the people for whom this works (I assume there must be some) but the statistics produced by the big clinical studies on the long term symptoms and disability levels that CRPS sufferers have simply don't add up with the "cheery" articles like this one which promote these simplistic multi-modal treatment protocols as highly sucessful.

Anyway, if Dr Prager's comment is correct that "six or more hours a day of intensive physical and occupational therapy" is the essence of successful treatment then most of us have no chance since that level of treatment is not on offer to most!! I was told that my CRPS movement disorder symptoms were such that I wouldn't be able to participate in such intensive therapy therefore I can't benefit from it!!