Lordwood -

I second MsL's concern. Please be advised, however, that because you are depressed you may be a candidate for ECT, preferrably "non-dominant unilateral electorconvulsive therapy" (more commonly known as "right-unilateral ECT" or just RUL-ECT) which has substantially fewer effects on long-term memory than does the treatment of long standing ("bi-lateral ECT" or BL-ECT.)

Praise God (PG for short?) apparently makes reference to a casenote by Wolanin MW, Gulevski V, and Schwartzman RJ, Treatment of CRPS With ECT, Pain Physician 2007, 10:573-578 free full text available at http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...chwartzman.pdf What makes this case so significant, is that the authors were simply following the patient for her pain, it was her psychiatrist who ordered the ECT for the pain induced depression (DSM IV code 293.83: mood disorder due to medical condition) whereupon she was cured of both!

The RSDSA Medical Archieves Page does a good job of posting full text copies of many of the most important medical articles on CRPS at http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...html#Treatment where they are listed first by broad category, and then alphabetically by the last name of the first author. NOTE TO ALL: Before putting up a link just to an abstract, please check the RSDSA page to see if free full text copies are already avialable and then link to that page.

And Lordwood, please note the great irony that it is far easier to get ECT for depression than chronic pain/CRPS! In fact, in California, I learned about a year ago that, following a well-meaning voter initiative passed in 1976, it's illegal to give ECT for anything other that certain defined psychiatrict conditions, outside of a formal human study approved by a medical center's Institutional Review Board (IRB), a process I'm told takes about a year of a physician's life.

Finally, you can also check out a review article I wrote a year and a half ago at the request of the RSDSA, Michaels F Jr., Right Unilateral Electroconvulsive Therapy Treatment for CRPS, Practical Pain Management 2008, March; 68-75 free full text at http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...haels_CRPS.pdf There's a lot of stuff in there, including reports of quite detailed safety studies.

Good luck!

Mike

ps It was also my upclose and personal understanding that the blanket "no psychiatric condtions" for the use of ketamine came not from Dr. Schwartzman but his IRB. Effective as of late 2004.