Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) is a neurological disorder that rewrites how a person’s nervous systems interpret incoming information, translating everything into pain signals. This bombards a person’s system to the point where other functions get put to the wayside, affecting everything from the ability to walk, muscle coordination, muscle strength, concentration, cognitive function, alters the overall health of a person’s organs, and more. Everything gets interpreted as pain, and actual pain makes our bodies respond like we’re in full-blown crisis mode when it’s only a papercut.

This disorder primarily impacts mobility and range of motion, but can lead to the development of depression, anxiety, organ complications, and PTSD from the pain flares, how we’re handled by medical professionals, or the original accident (if there was one).

A CRPS diagnosis does not guarantee you will be or are disabled, but it can be disabling to some depending on the severity of it and where you’re affected. CRPS presents differently in every patient, making it extraordinarily hard to diagnose, and adds to the complexity behind the simple question, “do I need a service dog?”

Not a Sure-Fire Disability Diagnosis

When your CRPS is only in one limb, you may not be disabled by it. It makes life harder, you need to adapt to the limitations and the constant pain, but you make it work. When your CRPS spreads to become full body, as mine is, it quickly becomes disabling as it impacts the basic ability to function in day to day activities. It is extremely difficult to move when you feel like you’ve been set on fire and all your bones have been crushed. As a result, muscles atrophy, your nerves misfire with spasms or tremors, and falls become more likely. Simple actions like doing laundry trigger massive pain flare ups in your arms and fatigue that leaves you bedridden, unable to complete any other activity that day, or possibly that week. Your quality of life and ability to simply adapt quickly go downhill.

CRPS has no cure, and once it reaches the point of disability, that’s for the rest of your life. Working with a service dog isn’t common for CRPS, but it should be. A service dog assisting someone with CRPS can dramatically increase their chance for a life of possibility, and make functioning in severe pain on a daily basis more achievable.

Depending on where a person’s CRPS is, it can impact their ability to:

  • Get dressed
  • Walk safely
  • Get off the floor after a fall
  • Clean the house
  • Rise from a chair
  • Do laundry
  • ​Basic Hygiene
  • Care for dependents
  • Work at a job
  • Sit or Stand for long periods of time
  • Learn new things/retain information
  • Go up & down stairs
  • Bend over without getting dizzy, losing balance, inducing splitting head pain
  • Open/close doors
  • Move objects heavier than 5 lbs
  • Do repetitive actions, like load the dishwasher
  • Find human assistance or call out when needed

*May not be a complete list. Needs change per patient. 

How Can a Service Dog Help?

Depending on how severe the person’s CRPS is, and if they feel they could benefit from a service dog’s assistance (or not), there are many tasks a service dog could be trained to perform to mitigate the impacts of CRPS on their handler’s life. The key idea to understand is that since CRPS is largely unpredictable and presents so variedly, CRPS service dogs have to be pretty flexible to match the changing needs. This, I think, is where more traditional service dog trainers might take issue with their validity and need, because it doesn’t conform to one set of standard tasks like other disabilities can use, and because a lot of what a CRPS service dog is in the pursuit of preventing pain flare ups from starting and thereby keeping their handler’s pain more stable that way.

How a CRPS Service Dog Might Help in the Aftermath…

  • ​Get handler off the floor safely after a fall
  • Find human assistance for handler after a fall, seizure, severe migraine onset, or other trauma because handler can’t call out
  • Get medication to help calm a flare after it has started
  • Guide handler to someplace safe to sit and recover after a fall or sudden flare onset

How a CRPS Service Dog Might Help in the Now…

  • ​Sense a handler’s legs are about to fail, and prevent a fall
  • Do Deep Pressure Therapy to calm their handler’s nervous system that’s been hyperactivated by a thunderstorm, flashbacks, general pain flare up, or sensory overload
  • Do Light Pressure or Grounding to help calm handler during triggering events, such as medical appointments, being in crowded stores that cause sensory overload, or confrontations with other people that trigger adrenaline episodes.
  • Notice a handler’s heartbeat change during the night as a result of a pain nightmare, and wake them up by pawing or nose nudging them
  • Find and guide handler to a person or location when their handler begins to get overwhelmed by bright lights and lots of movement in a busy store
  • Hear an alarm and get necessary daily medication for the handler
  • Retrieve an object the handler drops due to hand tremors
  • Brace to stabilize handler while they get dressed or undressed, get in/out of shower safely, or rise from a chair
  • Retrieve objects from another room to help handler prepare for day, such as shoes, keys, and gear
  • Help handler walk from one location to another and maintain stability on weak legs, painful flaring legs, or through leg muscle spasms
  • Help pull wheelchair up slight inclines
  • Stabilize your body temperature when your nervous system incorrectly perceives you as being deeply cold and triggers low level shock

How a CRPS Service Dog can Prevent Future Flares…

  • ​Open doors with ropes, pushing, or buttons to prevent an arm or wrist flare being triggered from the motion of turning or pulling
  • Load the dishwasher, sort clothes, load and unload washing machine and dryer, and help sort house clutter to prevent fatigue flares and repetitive movement flares
  • Move heavy objects from one place to another with ropes or a pulling harness to prevent flare up in handler’s arms, back, head, or legs from bending and lifting
  • Retrieve items on the ground to prevent a jaw flare or dizziness and a lack of balance that could result in a fall
  • Move ahead of handler through house to turn lights on in dark house to prevent handler bumping into furniture or straining arm trying to find switches
  • Pull clothes off to prevent pain flare up in hands from touching various clothing textures, or fatigue from effort of pulling motion

The possible ways a CRPS service dog can assist someone disabled by CRPS in the aftermath of a flare, during a flare, and in service to prevent a flare are vast. A lot of the work is typically prevention, but that doesn’t invalidate the work or the need for it. The secret to life with CRPS is finding a good way to keep your pain levels more stable, so that you have the capability and energy to actually have a quality of life and be an independent individual. Compared to other disabilities, CRPS shimmers in how concrete of an impact it has on any given day.

There are days when your CRPS dog will do a lot of tasks, and days when they do less. The need for their assistance is always there, but the veracity for which the CRPS impacts you changes on a daily basis. Speaking from experience, though, when the assistance brought by a service dog suddenly ends, the result is like a house of cards crumbling into ashes. A well-managed beast of a neuropathic pain condition overtakes every aspect of your ability to handle day to day life activities and everything else pales in comparison to managing the condition as effectively as your service dog once could.

Service dogs that work with people disabled by Complex Regional Pain Syndrome are not given as much attention and credibility as service dogs who help people with more well-known medical conditions. Part of this can be traced back to the overwhelming lack of knowledge and understanding for CRPS. The other reason is that the type of task work that CRPS service dogs do to make an impact in the quality of life and functionality for their disabled handlers breaks the mold on what “need” traditionally looks like, and can be harder to explain. Does that mean their value as working dogs or their credibility as service dogs should be questioned? In my opinion, absolutely not. I may be biased, but I’m also proof of the need for a service dog’s assistance for living with CRPS. Why? Because I partnered with one.

If you’d like to learn more about how a service dog might be able to help you manage your CRPS disability, send me an email and let’s set up a consult today!