It's $94.50 or this: These are your options

Oh, I loves me some Fred! 

Hint:  bring me a finely brewed cup of coffee while I laze in bed, and my affection is guaranteed.  [Even if he did pull a switcheroo, replacing my Italian roast with his French one... the wild and crazy guy!]

Readers dear, I've not been remiss in posting breaking crps studies.  Rather, my medical feeds have been strangely silent on the subject -- until yesterday, when i received notice of three publications, all in PAIN®, the official journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain® (IASP).



Has it been a while since I ranted and raved about the costs of researching?  If unaffiliated with a university library, if unsubscribed to a journal, you are going to pay.  In this instance, the cost is $31.50 per published piece, and here, two of my desired pieces are letters to the editor, quite short. Not that length determines import -- not in this instance!

Anti-inflammatory treatment of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome
Volume 151, Issue 2, Pages 251-256 (November 2010)

Sigrid G.L. Fischer, Wouter W.A. Zuurmond, Frank Birklein, Stephan A. Loer, Roberto S.G.M. Perez

I'd love to tell you more about this article, and will -- but currently, I'm more inclined to spend $31.50 on kibble and catnip.  Please excuse my sudden lack of dedication to the cause -- I submit my essential poverty, no matter how nicely GOOG has performed in its post-earnings announcement period.  [Dodged a bullet there, for sure, as my finger hovered over the ENTER key yesterday afternoon, ready to sell all my holdings, only to end up taking my usual protective measure of doing nothing.  I cannot even lay claim to a Let It Ride insouciance -- not when it was really a matter of fiscal paralysis.] 

Ahem.
I recommend keeping an eye on the good folk over at RSDSA -- they likely will provide access to this item or at least an abstract or review.  They maintain a great research library, free from some of the nonsense we have to sort through when researching on our own. 

Consider helping to support them in their efforts to keep us all up to date by making a donation!

Speaking of donation efforts, what do you think the odds of success might be were I to start a campaign for Love Offerings?  Hmm?  Would you make a Love Offering on my behalf?   (No, I am not talking DNA, but thanks so much for the thought.)

{blush}

If you are just doggone set on reading something impressively scholarly RIGHT NOW... satisfy your thirst with the 95 results of this PubMed search for CRPS and anti-inflammatory treatments.  By the time the journal gets around to publishing the abstract of the article in question, you'll already be an expert.

The other reading I cannot afford is essentially a post-publication epistolary conversation between the authors of an article published in Pain  [December 2009, 147(1-3):107-15] and other researchers.  Dr. Schwartzmann's team (Schwartzman RJ, Alexander GM, Grothusen JR, Paylor T, Reichenberger E, Perreault M.) produced a long-awaited report on outpatient intravenous ketamine, concluding:

Subjects in both the ketamine and placebo groups were administered clonidine and versed. This study showed that intravenous ketamine administered in an outpatient setting resulted in statistically significant (p<0.05) reductions in many pain parameters. It also showed that subjects in our placebo group demonstrated no treatment effect in any parameter. The results of this study warrant a larger randomized placebo controlled trial using higher doses of ketamine and a longer follow-up period.

Drs. Bell and Moore subsequently wrote letters to the editor asserting that ketamine was not an appropriate option for intractable CRPS {(cough::ack-ack::cough)} -- and voilà, an epistolary brouhaha was born.  I would love to read the whole thang, especially as it includes a response from "the other CRPS expert," Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick.

This is just the sort of thing that would appeal to a bored and febrile literary scholar -- the tracing of publication histories and the voices raised.  Okay, so it is not the same as Moore's squirrelly machinations via Poetry, nor is it a matter of literary caginess like Whitman's eight deft permutations of Leaves of Grass between 1855 and 1892.

I am going to bury a confession in the middle of this blah-blog post.  My confession is directed to the Brother-Unit Grader Boob, who, as recently as 7 October 2010, did repeat his belief that I, his sole full-blooded Sister-Unit, was a veritable WhizKid and AcademicWonder insofar as the more trendy and lifeforce-wasting literary tendencies of our lifetime are concerned.

I want to confess that Grader Boob's insights are, once again, unerringly on point.  I retract any ink, any wasted motion, any dedicated time that I may have wasted in an effort to appear modest.

Truth to power, friends, truth to power!

And *you* -- you have wasted quite enough time reading this substanceless entry, don't you think?  Move along, then, move along!

To make a Spontaneous Love Offering * , please donate HERE.

* From Stuff Christians Like, #72:  Love Offerings --

For those who don’t know, a love offering is kind of a “volunteer offering” the church takes up during special occasions like when a puppet group from Guam (named Strings of Mercy) is performing at your church. It’s really not that voluntary though because if you don’t contribute anything you’re essentially telling everyone you’re sitting near that your heart is not full of love. By not putting a couple of bucks in the offering plate you’re actually putting in a big fistful of hate. I wish when the ushers collected a love offering they would say out loud when someone didn’t give, “Oh, you don’t have any love for the magical world of puppetry? I guess love your neighbor doesn’t mean anything to you. Fine.”