Historical perspective of causalgia. Management of sympathetically maintained pain.

The plethora of terms included in the broad category of sympathetic dystrophies, and causalgia in particular, has made specific disorders, with unique clinical characteristics, very difficult to isolate into discrete clinical entities. Rather, the sympathetic dystrophies currently are regarded as existing along a continuum of varying severity and as having one basic pathophysiological mechanism, with considerable overlap of terms. The purposes of this article are 1) to review the theories of physiological mechanisms of causalgia and other forms of sympathetically maintained pain, 2) to describe their clinical characteristics, and 3) to discuss their physical therapy management.