Reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or complex regional pain syndrome, is a serious condition that can cause severe pain and disability. (View Wikipedia for detailed description.)
I was asked to visit an 83 year old woman who had suffered from this condition for more than a year, at her home to check her blood pressure. This was important, because one of the drugs she was taking for her condition sometimes caused dangerous lowering of blood pressure.
For no apparent reason, she developed pain, tingling, and inability to move her fingers on her right hand. Because she was unresponsive to anti-inflammatory medications and pain-killers, her orthopedic surgeon recommended surgery to “free-up” the ulnar nerve at the elbow that supplied the forearm and hand. (See red circle in the picture.) This area is better known as the “funny bone”. The operation was intended to relieve pressure on the nerve and ease the pain. Unfortunately, the nerve was damaged, causing severe pain, darkening of the skin and paralysis of the forearm and hand. Unable to bend her elbow or drive her car, she was virtually confined to her home.
She was suffering from a condition called “reflex sympathetic dystrophy”.
On my first visit, her right hand had been unusable and agonisingly painful for 12 months. Finger movement was impossible, and poor blood circulation caused the skin on the whole of her hand and forearm to be deep blue in colour, and icy cold. No physical treatment or medication had any effect on her condtions.
I told her that a week earlier, I had used the wheatgrass extract successfully on a 2 year old whose hands and feet had suddenly gone cold and blue due to Raynaud's disease - a blood circulation condition. After applying a small amount of wheatgrass extract to just one cold hand, her blood circulation recovered within a few minutes to both hands and feet.
After asking me to try and recover her arm, I squeezed a little wheatgrass extract cream on to a toothpick and very carefully applied it in a thin line, along her forearm and hand. To my amazement, I saw a thin, blanched line form instantaneously which then began to slowly widen, and within a couple of minutes, the entire dark-coloured area had turned white, then pink and warm, clearly due to the return of blood supply to the pale area.
Furthermore, after about three minutes, both her hands had turned warm and pink, which suggested that neurotransmission had crossed the spinal cord increasing blood circulation. A few minutes later, she had regained full sensation in her hand and the shooting pains that made her life such a misery had disappeared. She could also move her "paralysed" fingers for the first time in a year.
Follow up
When I called on her two days later, she was upset because her pain was only relieved for two or three hours, then returned. She was therefore reluctant to try the cream again on her arm. But, she did agree to me applying the wheatgrass cream over her elbow, near the ulnar nerve. To my amazement, this immediately relieved the pain of her forearm and hand and enabled extension of her left elbow's range of movement. It seemed that the extract had in some way restored blood circulation and nerve transmission affecting her arm and hand.
In some way, the extract had restored damaged sensory nerves to the brain - thereby "re-coupling" or restoring sensation ("feeling"), blood circulation and muscular movement to the area.
The patient then refused further extract "treatment". Nonetheless, complex physiological improvements had occurred in a very short period of time which stopped her pain and restored blood supply, sensation and movement to her forearm and hand.