Originally Posted by fmichael

Dear Ms. L -

Thanks for posting this. I'm willing to bet that you didn't notice in the upper tight hand corner of the PubMed page on which the abstract appears, there's a tag showing that the article is available in free full text at http://www.anesthesia-analgesia.org/...ull/105/4/1148.

I went to the article, the lady in question had CRPS-1 for all of three months. At that point (range) I could name a number of treatments that would be equally effective, including low dose ketamine. Frank Birklein et al are way too sophisticated not to be aware of this little point. As brief as the abstract was you think they could of included that, in constrast for instance to the case report on the successful use of ECT on a woman with refractory CRPS, of 4 years duration, that came out of Dr. Schwartzman's group a few years ago. Treatment of CRPS with ECT, Wolanin MW, Gulevski V, Schwartzman R, Pain Phys. 2007; 10: 573-578, free full text at http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...chwartzman.pdf

I suspect there's a lot of academic gaming going on in the German CRPS community. About a month ago I was reading Evolving Understandings About Complex Regional Pain Syndrome and its Treatment, Marcel Fechir, Christian Geber and Frank Birklein, Current Pain and Headache Reports 2008, 12: 186 – 191, and was struck by the fact in their survey of treatment methods, there was no discussion of ketamine, even though Dr. Schwartman sends his patients to Germany for the coma treatment, under the auspices of Ralph-Thomas Kiefer and Peter Rohr. Then I looked at the bibliography, and out of 66 cited articles, none were co-authored by Drs. Schwartzman, Keifer or Rohr, although there were lots of American authors cited.

Then, I ran an author search under PubMed, and although Biklein and Maihofner co-authored 12 articles, niether shared even one article with Drs. Schwartzman, Keifer or Rohr. Same with Franz Blaes, no cross-over with the Ketamine Three.

Something tells me there's a story there. But it's not obvious from the articles I've read. And unfortunately, even the "Advanced Search" features of PubMed don't allow you to search by author AND a word or phrase in the text. For what it's worth . . . .

Mike