Originally Posted by fmichael

This has been something I've been wondering about for years, but have never shared.

Beginning when I was a little kid, I had terrible allergies. Near fatal anaphalactic shock to insect stings, sulfa-drugs, tetnus toxoid, cats, guinnie pigs, kreosote stain, hay fever, you name it, many of them sent me to the ER at one time or another. I was really spared only asthma and food allergies. To the point that we had an immunogist living next doorm and when ever he needed a sample from a known allergic person, I was called down to his lab. (I think he called me the most allergic person he knew.)

I go on to having a series of desensitization shots, with mixed results. Finally I left Minnesota for LA: trading ragweed for acquired smog irritation.

Fast forward many years to 2005, four years into CRPS. I'm sitting one day in a parking lot and I look down to see a hornet gringing his thorax into me! (It's just with all the small-fiber neuropathy I can't feel it.) I then reach my kids' allergist, and she tells me to call her back in 20 minutes and let her what's happening. Only nothing does, not even a welt!

Amazed, she had me come into her office and we agreed to a complicted blood test, and after the serumgardeners was extracted it was put in a centrifuge and then immedately frozen and packed -in dry-ice for shipment to a guy's lab at Johns Hopkins. Two months later the results come back, after being tested for all 55 stinging insects in their inventory, I had ZERO REACTIVITY!!!

Now, there's literature out there - citations to be supplied once I'm home in a couple of days - suggesting that when people acquire an auto-immune disease, their immunonlogical signaling cells (the "T-helper") shift from the TH-1 - which are focussed on external agents - to TH-2 cells, which can signal immune attacks on the body itself. And it, although not in 2005 when this went down, is now well established that -at least in its intial stages - RSD/CRPS IS A DISEASE OF NEURO-AUTOIMMUNE INFLAMATION.

So with that, has anyone else seen their allergies fall away with the onset of RSD/CRPS?