How to Overcome Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) Without Trauma
- Feb 13
- 7 min read
Updated: Feb 16
Mel Abbott is a mind-body health specialist and founder of The Switch Program, a pioneering approach that helps people recover from chronic illnesses such as ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, CRPS, anxiety, and many other conditions.
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) is often described as the most severe pain condition known to medicine, and yet, in my clinical experience, it can also be one of the fastest to resolve. Drawing on pain neuroscience, neuroplasticity, and real-world clinical cases, this article explores how pain is created and how it can be stopped.
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) often develops after a relatively minor injury and typically affects a single limb, which may become intensely painful, swollen, discoloured, hypersensitive, and difficult or impossible to use. What is particularly striking is the type of person who often develops CRPS, highly driven, competitive, conscientious individuals, children and adults who push themselves hard, strive for excellence, and tend to have sensitive, vigilant nervous systems.
Conventional treatment for CRPS often involves graded exposure to touch, where a parent or therapist repeatedly touches the affected limb despite the person’s distress and intense pain experiences, with the aim of desensitising the nervous system. I have witnessed this approach carried out while children scream, sob, shake, and plead for it to stop. While well intentioned, this can be deeply traumatising and can reinforce the pain experience to the nervous system, and it always left me thinking, there has to be a better way than this.
This article shares my clinical experiences of teaching people how to rewire the brain’s pain centres, often resolving CRPS completely, and sometimes with remarkable speed and without causing any additional pain and distress.
A first encounter with CRPS
My first CRPS patient was a 12-year-old girl whose leg and foot were purple, swollen, intensely painful. She held the limb suspended in the air at all times because the pain was so severe she could not bear to place it on the ground. She had previously appeared on television demonstrating her treatment, her mother touching her leg while she screamed, sobbed, and trembled uncontrollably. It broke my heart to see.
She arrived at my four-day programme on crutches and still in constant pain. On the first day, she learnt how pain is generated by the pain centre in the brain, why pain can persist long after tissues have healed, and how the nervous system can become stuck in a danger response. And she learnt techniques to start rewiring this brain response.
By the end of Day 1, she tentatively placed her heel on the floor for the first time in months, without any increase in pain. By the end of the four days, she was walking, running, and rollerblading on the previously affected limb with no pain at all. Most importantly, she maintained her recovery with ease.
The neuroscience of pain: Why pain is real, and changeable
To understand how such rapid recoveries are possible, we need to understand the neuroscience of pain. Pain is not a simple signal sent from injured tissue to the brain. Instead, it is a protective output produced by the brain when it perceives threat.
Sensory signals from the body pass through multiple “gates” in the nervous system, where they can be amplified or dampened depending on emotional state, stress levels, prior experiences, beliefs, and expectations. This means pain is always real, but it is not always an accurate indicator of tissue damage.
In conditions like CRPS, pain is maintained by maladaptive neuroplasticity, faulty pain pathways that continue firing long after the original injury has healed. These pathways are reinforced by fear of pain, constant symptom monitoring, worry, and predicting pain before it occurs.
One of the clearest demonstrations that pain is generated by the brain is phantom limb pain, approximately 75% of amputees experience pain in a limb that no longer exists. The pain was never coming from the limb, it was always coming from the brain.
Severe pain, surprisingly fast recovery
Over time, I worked with many more people with CRPS through my four-day programme “The Switch”, and the pattern was remarkably consistent, rapid, full recoveries. Ironically, although CRPS is often described as the most severe pain condition known, I have found it to be one of the fastest to resolve.
My clinical sense is that this is because CRPS is often less systemic than conditions such as fibromyalgia. It usually involves a single limb, creating a very specific neurological loop, one that can be interrupted, retrained, and switched off.
A 30-minute pain transformation
One particularly striking case involved another 12-year-old girl whose leg had been held permanently off the ground for months. Her skin was covered in mud and scales because she could not tolerate it being washed or touched. When she learnt there was a three-month wait for The Switch, she burst into tears and said she could not bear to wait that long.
I offered her a one-to-one NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) session to support her in the meantime. I taught her the anaesthetic hand technique, a method I had learnt during my training and had previously used only once, on myself, to numb severe tooth pain caused by an exposed nerve for a week until the dentist could see me.
Over the course of just 30 minutes, this child progressively reduced the pain in her leg. First she touched it without pain. Then she stood. Then she walked. Then she ran, pain-free. She left with her mother carrying her crutches, no longer needing them.
The next day, her mother told me she had ridden her bike for the first time in months, slept with a duvet over her legs all night, and walked to the bus stop wearing stockings and shoes. I followed her progress for months afterward. The pain never returned, even after she later sprained her ankle playing netball.
Here is a movie of another child undergoing the same treatment and resolving CRPS in her leg and her stomach within one session.
When orthopaedic surgery meets mind-body medicine
After several more CRPS clients (children and adults) experienced similar outcomes, orthopaedic surgeon Mr Dunbar contacted me. He was astonished by how quickly two of his patients had recovered and flew me to Dunedin to meet him.
He later told me he couldn’t sleep that night because he was so excited. “This is the missing piece of the puzzle I’ve been searching for my whole career,” he said.
We have since co-presented at medical conferences and on radio, and he has incorporated mind-body approaches into his own practice. He explains it this way, “Orthopaedic surgeons are the carpenters of the medical world. We fix physical things. But fixing physical things doesn’t necessarily make pain go away. Pain is produced by the brain when it perceives threat, and that system can malfunction. Teaching people about the brain-body link allows them to reprogramme pain pathways back into health.”
Why long-term recovery requires more than symptom removal
Over five years, I treated many people with CRPS, some through a single one-hour NLP session and others through the full four-day Switch programme. Short-term outcomes were similarly good. However, those who completed the full programme were significantly less likely to redevelop CRPS after a new injury.
Those who completed the full programme gained a deeper understanding of pain neuroscience, learnt multiple techniques to rewire neural pathways as well as regulate their physiological stress response, released unresolved emotional trauma, and adopted lifestyle practices that support nervous system health. This wider breadth of healing led to more sustainable, long-term recovery. This means that I now always recommend the full Switch programme, even if the CRPS pain is resolved in one NLP session.
Seven seconds: A remarkable CRPS recovery
Recently, a highly driven 12-year-old boy with CRPS asked me what the fastest recovery I had ever seen was. “Seven minutes,” I replied. Determination flashed across his face.
Using the anaesthetic hand technique, he turned off the pain in his knee in five minutes. As we worked down his leg, he became faster and faster at turning off pain. He asked me to time him with a stopwatch. His best effort?
Seven seconds.
He lay on the couch laughing, banging his feet together above his head, shouting, “It’s all gone! It doesn’t hurt anymore!” He rode his bike that afternoon and later completed the full four-day programme, addressing perfectionism, stress, and nervous system regulation. Today, he is thriving, pain-free, active, and emotionally resilient.
For more information, visit here. You can attend my free 45-minute webinar “First Steps to Recovery” to learn more about pain neuroscience, neuroplasticity, and mind-body recovery.
Or you can sign up for The Switch 4-day programme, which can be attended live online or live in-person.
Read more from Mel Abbott
Mel Abbott, Therapist in Chronic Illness Recovery
Mel Abbott is a mind-body health specialist and founder of The Switch Program. After an 11-year struggle with chronic illness herself, she made a full recovery and has since helped thousands of people worldwide overcome conditions such as ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, CRPS, anxiety, and more, achieving around 80% success rates. She has been voted best speaker at two national GP medical conferences and is a contributor to the Otago Medical School Year 3 handbook, where her insights help shape the next generation of doctors. Mel’s work blends science, compassion, and practical tools to calm the nervous system and unlock the body’s natural healing ability. Her passion is simple yet powerful, recovery is possible!
References:
Flor, H. (2002). Phantom-limb pain: Characteristics, causes, and treatment. The Lancet Neurology, 1(3), 182-189.
Moseley, G. L., & Flor, H. (2012). Targeting cortical representations in the treatment of chronic pain. Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, 26(6), 646-652.
