Lisa -

In addition to the other references I sent you last week, you might want to check out the attached story form the Harvard Gazette on the work of Anne Louise Oaklander, MD, PhD, who has found interesting changes in skin (nerve densities) on the opposite side of the body - a mirrored imaged as it was - from that part of the body where the injury had been sustained. For your consideration:

Pain produces mystery nerve loss
Mirror-image pain distresses researchers
By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office

People who injure an arm or leg sometimes develop pain, swelling, or other unexpected symptoms in the opposite, uninjured arm or leg. Medical reports of such mirror-image effects go back at least to the Civil War and usually are blamed on overuse of the undamaged arm or leg.

Anne Louise Oaklander, director of the Nerve Injury Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, saw the glimmering of another explanation while studying patients with nerve damage from shingles. Caused by the virus that produces chicken pox in children, shingles inflicts adults with a painful rash of crusting blisters. It usually occurs on one side of the body. When the rash is treated, the pain goes away for some people, but lingers in others.

Oaklander, who is also an assistant professor of anesthesiology and neurology at Harvard Medical School, removed pinhead-size skin samples that allowed her to count how many nerves are working in small areas of skin. She found dramatic, long-lasting loss of nerve endings in areas previously affected by shingles. That was expected. But when her team checked skin from unaffected areas directly opposite the shingles outbreak, they were startled to see half the nerve endings had been lost there as well. . . .

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/...6/01-pain.html

Dr. Oaklander's recent study, "Evidence of focal small-fiber axonal degeneration in complex regional pain syndrome-I (reflex sympathetic dystrophy)," 120 Pain 235–243 (2006), can also be found on my favorite webpage, the RSDSA Medical Articles Archive. Click here http://www.rsds.org/2/library/articl...ive/index.html and scroll down for an alphabetical listing of the study - by author- under the heading of "Research."

take care,
Mike