Pilar (Madrid), 70, comes to Piñal y Asociados clinic in Madrid with a diagnosis of reflex sympathetic dystrophy or Sudeck’s atrophy, after an operation on a trapeziometacarpal osteoarthritis: “It felt like a wooden hand and full of pain”.
The patient is treated by Dr. Piñal and his team twenty-six months after an operation on a trapeziometacarpal osteoarthritis (degenerative alteration of the TMC joint also known as osteoarthritis of the thumb basal joint) and the subsequent diagnosis as Sudeck dystrophy in the affected limb. Presents a complex picture of pain, tingling and functional limitations.
From these data, the Spanish surgeon and his surgical unit carry out a diagnostic reevaluation and design a new procedure based on it.
The results of the surgery are satisfactory, with functional recovery of the hand and arm and elimination of pain from the intraoperative phase. The patient’s general situation shows a notable improvement just two weeks after Dr. Piñal’s intervention.
Dr. Piñal does not consider complex regional pain síndrome (CRPS) or 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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