Vega (La Rioja), 60, diagnosis of reflex sympathetic dystrophy or Sudeck’s atrophy after a scaphoid fracture: “They told me I had Sudeck’s syndrome and there was nothing to do.”

The patient is treated by Dr Piñal and his team in Madrid, four years after a scaphoid fracture in the left wrist and a subsequent diagnosis as Sudeck’ss atrophy. She presents a picture of intense pain, tingling and limitations of mobility that affect the arm as a whole and had led her to be treated in the pain unit.

From this point, the Spanish surgeon performs a diagnostic reassessment and designs a new procedure to address the new pathology identified.

The results of the surgery are practically immediate with a remarkable functional recovery already in the intraoperative phase itself. Two months after the intervention the pain has disappeared and the patient has regained function in her upper limb.

Dr. Piñal does not consider Sudeck’s atrophy a pathology per se, but rather a diagnostic formula that masks an unidentified origin of the patient’s real problems, which appear after an intervention, a fracture or an infectious process, among other precedent pictures.

Thus, more than a century after its description as “acute inflammatory bone atrophy” by the German surgeon Paul Südeck, Dr Piñal and his surgical unit have already cured dozens of patients with this diagnosis, through an innovative clinical approach that, in expert hands, produces spectacular results.

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