RSD Pain

[allent]

I was diagnosed with RSD of the left foot (later both feet) in 1995; about the same time the Internet made it possible to research almost anything, even from a sickbed. Being almost totally bed-confined, I had time to learn all I could about RSD, so I did.

It wasn’t easy: The only time I ever cheated in college was taking a psychology final for another student, while she took my biology final; we both passed, but neither deserved to, and I hadn’t learned much. I had a lot to learn, including a new language that I call “Medspeak”, which I try to translate into people talk in my posts.

It didn’t take long to figure out that no one really knows much about RSD. Until recently, RSD “experts” couldn’t even agree on which nervous system is involved, and now that they have, they’re wrong again. The “experts” did accomplish one thing, however; they destroyed the idea of the SNS having a causal role in RSD.

They didn’t just reject the SNS, they killed and buried it; changing the name from RSD to CRPS in order to totally abolish any thought that the two might be connected. Today, central sensitization (CS) and the spinal cord are believed to be entirely responsible for CRPS.

Most clinicians who treat RSD patients learned about this disease during the SNS era, and few bother to keep up with the latest research, they still look for better ways to relieve pain, hoping that the “experts” will someday discover the cause.

Whether they believe it, or just repeat “SNS” as a ritual incantation, their patients – us – keep hearing, and repeating, “SNS dysfunction”, but before too much more time passes, they’ll be talking about CS and urging patients to try ketamine or some stronger anesthetic (which will mitigate the pain for a while).

It isn’t central sensitization either, and I’ll have much more to say about that in a future post, but this is about cyanosis, so I’ll just point out that CS theory never mentions it. CS theory only addresses pain.

You may think that it must not be that important, but physicians know that it is. They know that whenever they see it, vital oxygen isn’t reaching the cells. It's been said that we can live 3 weeks without food and 3 days without water, but we die after 3 minutes without oxygen, and that sounds about right.

Cyanosis develops into gangrene in frostbite, late-stage diabetes, and Raynaud’s syndrome, because most of the cells have been killed and are rotting, so debridement or amputation is necessary or the patient could die. We don't die, so our cyanosis must be different.

Cyanosis also means severe pain in. When docs see cyanosis in those disorders, they know the patient is suffering. I will show you exactly why your cyanosis proves you’re suffering from neuropathic pain. You can show it to others who can’t understand how someone can possibly hurt that much without something physical causing it. It is physical.

The difference between me and the "experts" is that they say the pain causes the RSD, while I say the cyanosis causes the pain. Pain doesn’t cause RSD; RSD causes pain. There is a difference.

You can forget everything you ever heard about the SNS in RSD: The “experts” now agree it was wrong. They want you to know that the SNS isn’t involved after all. They want us to believe it’s all happening in our brain and spinal cord, and they want us to pretend cyanosis doesn’t matter.

If you think cyanosis might be important, I hope you will read this series of posts carefully, because I claim to have found a physical disorder that explains every step in the RSD process. There is a physical cause for this disease.

If I’m right, RSD isn’t an incurable neurological disorder, but a treatable physical condition. Medicine has never found a way to heal damaged nerves, so if it’s neurological, CRPS is incurable.

Doctors sometimes do know how to heal tissue, however, so if it’s physical, significant healing is possible; but that won’t happen until docs begin to treat the physical cause.

You only need to know one fact about cyanosis to know how important it is: It always means that healthy cells are being damaged and destroyed. The destruction can take decades in COPD; months in diabetes, or days in frostbite, but it’s always going on. Your cells are slowly being destroyed, even as you read this.

I believe RSD is actually a disease called ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI). I think I was the first person to see the link between RSD and IRI because I was the first person familiar with RSD to even learn that the IRI exists. It’s very rare; rarer than RSD, or it is until more people who know about RSD start learning about it.

I had a head-start. I was able to see that none of the so-called neurological explanations ever explained anything. I learned about nerves long before I ever thought of my RSD as a problem. In fact, my RSD has never been a problem: I have so many diagnosed, and severely painful back, spine and nerve injuries that I was totally disabled at the moment I was injured.

I’ll tell that story later, and then you’ll know why I claim that it’s impossible for nerve damage of any sort to cause RSD. Almost all of our nerves are problematic in RSD, but can all of them be damaged? They must be, but no one can find any nerve damage.

Cyanosis can explain the invisible nerve damage in RSD. Doctors already know cyanosis can cause pain, but they don’t seem to understand that it might explain our pain. When they first looked up RSD, they learned that the SNS somehow explains our cyanosis, and they haven’t heard that the SNS is officially dead. Some will never change their thinking (I call those people “anal-retentive”).

If you would like to learn whether a physical disorder is causing your RSD, I have much more to say. If you believe that this can only be a neurological disorder and nothing I say can change that, never mind.

I always ask for questions from people who don’t quite understand what I’m saying, but rarely get any. I get challenges from people who will never change their thinking, and that’s ok; I’m just not going to answer them.

I think that if you really want to know the truth about RSD, you must read my posts: If I have the truth, this is the only place you’re going to find it…Vic