Note1: The video excerpt above is from yesterday’s Decades of Stagnation in Migraine, CRPS, Pain Management: Migraine Consensus Review and Critique—30 years of evidence reviews nonstop medical propaganda.
Note2: This is going to be a stepwise progression of insights, details, history and—ultimately—some therapeutic tools. But it’s not going to be the big kahuna, the big kabosh, or the full-meal deal until the ideas have time to percolate to the surface. You can reasonably expect the new sections to be added caudally (toward the end) on each update, although a few clarifications might occur more proximally (closer, toward the beginning).
“Sometimes it seems to stand still. Like you’re in a bag and you can’t get out and somebody’s always telling you that it will get better with time and time just seems to stand still and laugh at you and your pain.” ― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
You know I have to begin with Semantics
The current name for the condition is Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, abbreviated CRPS. You don’t have to be neuroscientist or grammatician to immediately recognize that the name “Complex Regional Pain Syndrome” is your choice of stupid, gobbledygook, or just the same medical nonsense that we are used to by now. At the expense of 30 characters and 8 syllables, this terminology communicates nothing, and the condition has not been clarified nor differentiated.
Complex?—Many things in life are complex, depending on what level of detail we can perceive (perception maximizes complexity) and organize (organization minimizes complexity).
Regional?—OK, big deal. Everything is either systemic, regional, or localized, but we don’t go around titling each disease as such. Besides, this is wrong from an integrative-functional sense in which we appreciate everything as interconnected, and I have this clearly diagramed on the cover of my book (PDF).
Pain?—Many conditions are painful but we don’t include “pain” in the name. Osteoarthritis is painful, but we don’t call it “osteoarthritis pain syndrome” just like we don’t call migraines “migraine pain syndrome.” So, including “pain” in the name is a bit foolish.
Syndrome?—“Syndrome” is definitely one of the most worthless words in medical terminology; it simply means “a collection of symptoms and signs that consistently occur together” which means that everything is a syndrome because all diseases have patterns of signs and symptoms that cluster together.
