There is no shortage of clinical guidelines for CRPS. Since 2010 we have had guidelines from the Netherlands, from the UK and in the last few months from the USA. Guidelines are always an interesting beast. We decided we wanted to get an up-to-date overview on the evidence (and only the evidence) from clinical trials for any and all interventions for CRPS, be they rehabilitation based, pharmacological or surgical/ invasive.

Two foods I love eating regularly are tuna and ice cream. Thankfully, I have a firm grasp of the concept that some things just weren’t made for mixing.
I contend that my tuna-ice cream metaphor might help us to understand why some interventions treating CRPS may not be working.

Lorimer talks about a recent paper which strongly endorses the cortical body matrix idea by showing that people with CRPS, with a cold painful hand, actually seem to have a cold side of space.

Imagine being offered one half of a Snickers Bar that on first glance was cut into two equal halves. Unless a machine bisected it, the right half would still be just a tiny bit larger. Why is that?

I know that many of you out there are ‘in the ‘hood’ with respect to writing and reviewing manuscripts. For the rest of you, here are some cracker reviews we got on a paper concerning the development of CRPS. I have had to remove some bits because they give away the journal and the study, which we will resubmit somewhere else. If you have any similarly complimentary reviews you are prepared to share, we could start a repository for them. Might make a good book one day….

Evidence has been accumulating that shows that people with chronic pain have modifications in body awareness. Camila Valenzuela-Moguillansky writes about a large review just published on this research

Luke is a PhD student researching some of the factors that play a role in the development of complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). Here he is talking more about what he does at BiM.

What do you get when a group of German neurologists publishes their clinical assessments from 118 patients with CRPS?

Some of you may remember that we ran a limerick competition. Well we now have a winner – it captures that intriguing pathophysiological characteristic of people in chronic pain – cortical disinhibition

At the world congress on pain in Glasgow, 2008, a small group of CRPS researchers got around a table and asked each other something like ‘isn’t it high time we got together and wrote a current concepts in CRPS pathophysiology paper?’

I recently read an interesting article from Vraceany et al titled “Less specific arm illnesses”. The authors make some very good points about what are frequently futile clinical approaches. However, the foundations they erect to support these arguments made me think about how we approach the whole idea of what is and isn’t biopsychosocial treatment.