Dear Nicole -

I stay in touch with a number of people in the LA area over the phone, and have acquired a couple friends with whom I break bread now and then. In my experience, these contacts are unambigiously good, except it can be painful when someone breaks off with you more or less without notice. (And note to Laura: I owe you an email BIG TIME!!! 1,000 apologies.)

That said, I know that a lot of other folks are involved in much more extensive email networks and the like, although to my knowledge, most of them are not area specific.

Please send me a PM with your contact info.

Mike


PS There was a more formal organization - I believe a chapter of the RSDSA - that was active around the time I got my Dx, but as was explained to me in a 2002 phone call, they were as a group devotees of a neurosurgeon, Aaron G. Filler, MD PhD, now in Santa Monica, who performs surgery under MRI to releave "nerve entrapments," and were all basically recovered, so my caller saw her group as in the process of shutting down.

Where it's a highly controversial procedure, due to the strong chance of developing entrapping scar tissue from the surgery itself, and I knew that the deep location of my injuries didn't lend them to a favorable surgical outcome in the first place, I never pursued it. (Although no longer on his website, at onetime it contained an extensive list of papers that had not been accepted for publication, for whatever reason.) http://www.nervemed.com/about/dr-aaron-g-filler-md-phd