I can't believe how much better I feel reading all of your replies, I felt so alone in all of this like no one understood what my husband was going thru. I don't know why I didn't speak up earlier.

We are in california and my husband has a horrible pain doctor..all he does is push drugs on him. He even started speaking with a psychologist and all he seems to focus on are my husbands drugs too! Unfortunately we are very limited in the choice of doctors because he was injured at work and this is all thru workers comp...another battle we have to fight. I do consider him lucky in the fact that the workers comp hasn't denied any treatment yet and they seem to accept the fact that his injury has resulted in CRPS which I hear can be tough to prove. My husband does have a tens unit and we use it although he can't tell if its doing anything. He has also been thru about a year of phys therapy..some for the shoulder injury and some with a specialist that does rehab for CRPS patients only. The good news is that our lawyer requested that he sees a new doctor and yesterday we heard from them that he is going to be able to meet with her in 2 weeks...I am very grateful that we have a very aggressive lawyer who has dealt with people suffering from CRPS and they know who to see and what to do. Its all so confusing because there is so much grey area with this disease....no black and white. What works great for someone doesnt work for the next person, my dh feels like a guinea pig sometimes. For example when he was on neurotin and his dr told him to try Lyrica...he was told not to mix the 2 drugs that he needed to taper off of neurotin they try the Lyrica...so he gave the neurotin one more month to see if it would help. Then he goes back to the dr and he tells him to take both! I was like WHAT?!?!? That makes no sense, good news is he wont be going back to that dr anymore, when someone is miserable and counting on their dr to help them the least they should do is be consistant with their facts. We have learned to forget about the so-called bed-side manner...I think that once drs go thru their residency they throw that all out the window.

Anywhoo enough complaining...I did find a great article that someone had posted on here about pain and the long term effects it has on a persons system. The whole fight or flight response that someone goes thru and it has helped me to explain to my sweet hubby why his body needs this medicine. We have 3 kids , one is still very young and she needs her daddy for a very long time still and he is determined to do what he can to keep a normal household for her. Im hoping that once we go see this new dr and she explains (yet again!) that he really does have CRPS that maybe he will be more willing to accept this diagnosis and start fighting back. Good thing that he is a stubborn as they get and once he sets his mind to something he doesnt give up!