Vicc -

The relevant portion of the Boston Globe article is as follows:

At Mass. General, for example, Dr. Anne Louise Oaklander is already measuring "the objective correlates of pain" by counting the numbers of pain-sensing nerve endings in tiny skin samples from patients with unexplained pain. Paradoxically, patients with previously unexplained pain tend to have fewer such endings.

Such skin biopsies allow researchers to diagnose "small fiber neuropathies," the nerve damage that is sometimes a side effect of diabetes and other diseases. The nerve endings are so tiny that they have been largely invisible, Oaklander said, but skin biopsies are "opening a window into the pain system, allowing us to see when it is damaged."

Oaklander's work recently helped a college athlete who suddenly began experiencing an unbearable burning sensation in his palms and on the soles of his feet, according to a paper slated for publication in the February issue of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.

Greg Palladino, a lacrosse goalie at Southern New Hampshire University, was on a team trip to Bermuda last year when he began suffering a pain that only submersion in ice would alleviate. It was as though broken glass were running through his veins, he told his doctors.

He returned home and was treated repeatedly at area hospitals for weeks. Despite extensive tests, the doctors were baffled, said Palladino's father, Steven. Medicine failed to help, and he lost 55 pounds in weeks.

When Oaklander was called in, she did a skin biopsy that showed conclusively that Palladino's "erythromelalgia" -- his red, burning appendages -- stemmed from severe damage to small nerve fibers that apparently came on because of an auto immune reaction. For some reason, his body had started attacking its own nerve cells.

The biopsy gave doctors the confidence to put Palladino on enormous doses of steroids to stop the auto immune attack, and he has almost completely recovered, his father said. [Emphasis added]

I hope this is helpful. And seriously, I wasn't attempting to hijack your thread, it was just when you came on more than a little strong against Dr. Schwartzman and said catagorically that there was no evidence linking RSD to peripheral nerve changes that I felt that I had to come in.

Mike