CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome)

What is CRPS?

CRPS describes a specific set of symptoms with no known cause that typically affect an arm, hand, leg or foot. These include pain that can feel aching or electric-like and other sensations such as tingling, burning, and numbness. This often begins after an injury, though the injury might not be to the affected area. Sometimes there is swelling or changes in skin color to red, blue or purple. It can occur in only one limb or spread to others. 
 
There is no evidence that CRPS is caused by a structural disease and symptoms have been relieved with the PPD approach. This is why CRPS is assumed to be caused by the brain with the autonomic nervous system involved if there is swelling or change in skin color.  

Why would the brain do this? Nearly always, one or more types of stress is involved even if this is not fully recognized at first.  These include:

  1. Adverse Childhood Experiences and their long-term impact including:

    a. Stressful personality traits such as focusing too much on the needs of others, excessive self-criticism, perfectionism, lack of assertiveness and many others.

    b. Unrecognized negative emotions such as anger, fear, shame, grief, or guilt.

    c. Triggers including people, situations or events that remind you of stressful situations.

  2. Current life stresses

  3. Depression, Anxiety or Post-Traumatic Stress

The good news is that all these sources of stress can be successfully diagnosed and treated.

To learn more about whether you might have these issues, try taking the self-diagnostic quiz below. It has 12 ‘Yes or No’ questions. The more questions to which you answer ‘Yes’, the more likely it is that the resources on this website will help you.