Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is a syndrome that doctors don't fully understand yet. For unknown reasons, after a seemingly minor injury, someone can develop the extremely painful syndrome. In many cases, it does go away - but that seems to be a case of if it will go away on its own, it does so before you've had it for too long.

Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), which used to be called reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD) is a puzzling illness for both doctors and patients. It's a syndrome that doctors don't understand as they don't yet know what causes it. The syndrome causes intense pain that can be described as aching or burning. There can also be a change in skin color, the temperature of the skin over the affected area may feel different, and there may be sweating on just that area as well.

Spinal pain, or back pain, is very common in the Western world. In fact, it affects up to 80 percent of people at least one time in their life. Usually, the pain is nonspecific, not caused by any particular trauma or injury, or there isn't any body part or tissue that has been noticeably injured.

Pain pumps are often used after joint surgery to deliver a controlled amount of anesthetic and narcotic. This device provides good pain relief. Patients use less narcotic medication. But previous animal studies have shown that some drugs (lidocaine, bupivacaine) actually cause chondrocytes (cartilage cells) to die.

It's easy for both the patient and the practitioner to get focused on one site of pain. But, in fact, studies show that most patients have multiple sites of pain and symptoms. This information can be very important when evaluating a patient's condition.

A single site of localized pain can be a very different medical problem than one of widespread involvement. Joint pain or musculoskeletal pain and symptoms from more than one area suggests a systemic problem.

You are actually much more of a typical case than not. Very few people with musculoskeletal pain really have just one pinpoint area of pain. When asked, most have widespread pain and symptoms. That's why a drawing of this type is helpful.

Instead of focusing on one problem area, you can let your physician know the whole picture. This can be helpful when evaluating a problem or prescribing treatment. Diagnosing and treating local pain only addresses a small part of the problem.

When patients report back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, or other local sites of body pain, it's rare that they don't have pain in other parts of the body as well. But most studies focus on an individual (local) area of pain. So the idea that low back pain is really present as part of a widespread pain pattern gets lost.

Health care professionals depend on good sources of information to keep up-to-date on evidence-based medicine. One of the most reliable publications comes from the Cochrane Collaboration. Everyone pays attention when they publish a study.

There is still much argument and debate among health care professionals about the use of potentially addictive medications such as opioids. When these drugs are prescribed for chronic pain problems, there is concern that more and more drug will be needed to maintain the same level of pain control.

Becoming dependent on a narcotic makes it more difficult to withdraw from opioid therapy. This is true even when pain control is so poor there seems no point in taking the drug.

The regulation of narcotics such as opioid therapy for cancer pain has been softened since the late 1990s. There just wasn't enough evidence to support the idea that opioid treatment always led to severe addictions. And there were many chronic pain patients (including cancer patients) who really needed to benefit of these medications.