[livingwith]

Hi, my sister has full body RSD It started 2 years ago. She injured her right foot because of running in place and fractured one of her metatarsal bones. She has had a very hard life these past 2 years. She was only 22 when she got this horrible disease. Right now, she is able to walk and get around, but she doesnt leave the house and doesnt work. She is trying to get disability and my family has hired a lawyer to help her get that.
My concern is for her future. She never leaves the house, ...Read the full article

[docsperbeck]

Hi, I am very sorry to hear about your sister. I do not have RSD, but I am a doctor that sees people in a lot of pain and I'm familiar with the medical merry-go-round. I want to be brief and I don't want to give you or your family false hope, I just want to share some information and maybe offer an option. I am currently involved in a research study with the Neurologic Relief Centers for fibromyalgia. We have discovered a cause of the symptoms of fibromyalgia, a treatment that not only corrects the cause of the symptoms but also gives long lasting relief from the return of the symptoms. We have found the symptoms come from meningeal compression and we have a test to determine whether or not a person will respond to the treatment. The test takes up to fifteen minutes, and it is painless. During the test, if the patient will respond to the treatment, their pain will almost completely go away, but the relief is only temporary, because it's just a test, not the treatment. What has this got to do with RSD. One of our doctors recently tested an RSD patient with twenty years of foot pain, and she could stand on her foot with no pain for the first time in twenty years. We think the same meningeal compression that causes the symptoms of fibromyalgia, may cause the symptoms of RSD. As in many conditions, there are sometimes more than one cause, so just because the doctor helped this one person doesn't mean all RSD is the same. But I will tell you, 95% of fibromyalgia patients respond to the test and the treatment. We are concluding our Fibromyalgia study before we start a new neurologic disease study, but I would be willing to test your sister for no charge if you are ever in the Cincinnati region. Every person that gets relief from the test, can get relief from the treatment. If she doesn't respond to the test, at this point, I would not recommend she try the treatment. Anyway, I hope this might help you. If you have further questions, you can e-mail me at [moderator note: e-mail address has been removed]. I'm not trying to solicit your sister for some new treatment, we are currently doing a research project and one of the local pain management doctors is referring all his RSD patients to me for testing. If you want, I'll let you know how that goes first. Take care.