CRPS Awareness - The Purple Bucket Foundation Inc.

Our Story

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome is exactly that – Complex: Many, many different problems have been identified in people with CRPS. These problems can be severe and usually involve many of our biological systems. This makes the situation complex. Regional: The symptoms of CRPS are almost always confined to a particular region of the body. The arm of the leg is the most commonly involved region. Sometimes CRPS of one arm spreads to the leg on the same side of the body. Sometimes it spreads to the opposite arm, in which it usually ‘mirrors’ the other one. Pain: CRPS is exquisitely, severely, painful. Like the other symptoms, the pain is confined to the affected limb or limbs. Often the skin is too tender to touch and the whole limb is too painful to move. In fact, sometimes the limb is too painful to even imagine moving. Syndrome: A syndrome is a pattern of symptoms that often occur together. Normally, the reason that something is called a syndrome is that we do not know what causes it, we just know that this pattern of symptoms occurs together and usually at the same time. So, CRPS is the name given to a pattern of symptoms that often occur together. Diagnosis of CRPS Because CRPS is not based on a particular injury, bacteria, virus, or other identifiable cause, diagnosis of CRPS relies on the symptoms and signs (signs are things that someone else can observe, symptoms are things that you feel, for example, feeling cold is a symptom. Actually being cold is a sign.) Not all the signs and symptoms are always present. So, the official position established and endorsed by the International Association for the Study of Pain is that we should use this checklist: What this means that you can not really diagnose yourself with CRPS based simply on your symptoms. There is no added diagnostic value of: x-rays, bone scans, blood tests, sympathic function tests, quantitative sensory testing, nerve conduction tests. How many people have CRPS? No one really knows how many people have CRPS, but some really good research studies give us a rough idea. For example, one really good study, undertaken in The Netherlands suggests that, every year, one person in every 4000 will develop CRPS. That doesn’t really sound like many, but it means that about 5000 Australians, 20 000 Brits and 75 000 Americans, will get diagnosed with CRPS this year. That is how many people will get it. How many people will actually have it in any given year? In crude terms, you can just multiply that number by 5 – 25 000 Australians, 100 000 Brits and 400 000 Americans. Now the numbers look big. They look even bigger when you consider that treatment for each patient with chronic CRPS costs about AU$12,000 per year and total lost income due to CRPS in Australia (a small country by population standards) exceeds $1 billion. Summary of Wikipedia entry – original Author Dr Moseley 2004 The Purple Bucket Foundation Inc. is Australia's 1st CRPS Health Charity.