Ms. Sonya G.

Ms. Sonya G. -Georgia - This is a sweet young lady who had a severe right leg injury with a lawnmower while cutting her grass. She required several surgeries to repair her injuries but developed severe Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy of her right lower leg and foot. She underwent the usual series of lumbar sympathetic blocks which helped temporarily for her progressively worsening deep burning and electric-shock-like pains. Over the next 10 years, she basically could not function without aggravating her chronic RSD pain with any weight-bearing - she laid in bed most of the day hoping to that she would somehow not wake-up one day to get relief. Before she found me, her doctors under-medicated her severe un-relenting RSD pain and considered her a drug-seeker or drug-addict, because all she wanted was some pain relief.

When I first examined her, I found her to have Fibromyalgia underneath her severe RSD. In fact, I have found Fibromyalgia in 99% of my chronic pain patients and Fibromyalgia in 100% of my chronic RSD patients.

When I treat both condition simultaneously, the patients become a lot better, actually allowing me to reduce their overall narcotic dose!

Unfortunately, there are just too many Sonya's out there who do actually would like or have committed suicide just to get final pain relief.

Perhaps, by some Miracle or by the Grace of God, her boyfriend came across my website and had her come to see me approximately 2 years ago. Here is her recent testimonial on how I was able to get her life back:

"I would like to state that Dr. Gatell has been seeing me for several years...He has helped me in everyway to get better than any doctor I have been to...I would also like to state that other pain doctors have given me nerve blocks that I didn't want because they were hurting me worse and caused numbness in different areas and even [stool] incontinence.

Nerve blocks, after RSD pain for nearly 10 years will make things worse.

Dr. Gatell has improved my pain by 50% by using medicine treatment instead of injections...I really want to thank him for my life.

Thank you,

Sonya Green - July 8, 2002"

Of note, is that Ms. Sonya G. and her boyfriend decided to see an RSD "expert" in order to be consider a Dorsal Column Stimulator or Morphine Pump and I agreed that this would be a good idea - she wanted not to have to take so many "pills" if she could. What this doctor decided to do was stop most of her pain medicines acutely and instead did several lumbar facet blocks before considering the other procedures noted above. This was despite the fact that nerve blocks never worked for her, but actually aggravated her RSD (CRPS-I) or now her more likely permanent causalgia nerve pain (CRPS-II). These nerve blocks of course aggravated her condition. She finally decided to return to me. she was in such severe acute RSD pain that she could barely walk into my office one evening. I immediately treated her using my newly purchased non-invasive Matrix electrotherapy machine that stopped her severe RSD pain and then I slowly returned her to her original treatment that I had her on before.

Unfortunately, many pain doctors are trying just nerve blocks on patients, many times when they don't even work for very long to avoid "addiction" despite the fact that addiction to narcotics is very low when treating chronic pain. Health care workers still confuse "addiction" with the expected "drug tolerance" that eventually develops with most narcotics that can result in normal expected "withdrawals" if the medicine is reduced too fast. Long-acting narcotics help reduce this tolerance, especially Methadone due to its special NMDR receptor inhibition in the spinal cord and brain.