Shannon Stocker was 30 years old and in her last year of medical school when she first felt the pain. It started in her arm and eventually spread throughout her body. The pain became so intense that this newly minted M.D. was forced to put her medical career on permanent hold.
The cause of her suffering was a disorder called reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or RSD. (It’s also called complex regional pain syndrome, or CRPS.)
After exhausting other treatment options, she gambled on a high-risk, experimental procedure called ketamine-coma therapy, which would render her unconscious for FIVE DAYS. To undergo it, she’d need to travel to a hospital in Monterrey, Mexico, because the FDA hasn’t approved ketamine-coma therapy for use in the U.S. Given the procedure’s experimental status, riskiness and cost, no physician in the U.S. even offers it.
Today, we talk with Stocker about her long ordeal with RSD/CRPS, the experimental procedure she bet her life on, and how she’s doing now.
For more information about RSD/CRPS, including a list of published studies evaluating the effectiveness of ketamine-coma therapy and other treatments, check out the show notes for this episode at https://painopolis.com/ketamine-coma-therapy-for-rsd-crps/.