CRPS Awareness - Let's Get People Diagnosed
Today on Twitter a group of us are trying to get the subject of CRPS awareness trending.
What is CRPS I hear you ask?. I'm not suprised really. Not many people have heard of it. I hadn't heard of it till four years ago.
CRPS (or RSD (Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy) as it used to be known) stands for "Complex Regional Pain Syndrome a "chronic progressive disease characterized by severe pain, swelling and changes in the skin" which causes "long-term burning pain in a limb or part of a limb." The side effects of this severe contiuous pain means that the affected body part (or parts) can become very difficult to use. In fact CRPS sufferes are often catorgerised as disabled due to the diffcult that CRPS causes in their day to day lives. There is no known cure for CRPS meaing that sufferes are forced to live with the pain day in day out, though pain medication and physiotherapy can help.
Symptons of CRPS include
Swelling
Muscle and Joint Problems
Abnormal Sweating
Overly Senstive Skin
Skin Tempreture Changes
Skin Colour Changes
Despite being first reported during the American Civil War still not much is known about CRPS, what causes it or why it affects more Women than Men. And as the symptoms are so varied few people realise that they have it, mistaking it for something else. But if we can just raise awarness a little bit, maybe more people will get diagnosed. And the more people that are diagnosed the more infomation can be gathered, and the more information that can be gathered the more can be done about it.
Why do I care about this so much. Because phantomreviewer one of my closest friends sufferes from it. I've seen what living with CRPS is like.
So please. Link to this entry or copy the links below to your own blogs and lj's. If you have a Twitter account please come over and help us get CRPS Awarness trending by using the #CRPSAwareness hashtag
http://www.nationalpainfoundation.org/articles/52/signs-and-symptoms
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Complex-Regional-Pain-Syndrome/Pages/Introduction.aspx
We might not be able to cure it. But we can at least do something.