My therapist has asked that I do desensitisation of my limb with CRPS. It is painful to rub any object or surface over my limb. How can this help?

With CRPS, your brain changes the way it perceives the affected limb. This can occur within a few days of the onset of limb pain. There seems to be a direct relationship between the severity of pain in CRPS and the severity of body perceptual disturbance in the brain. Desensitisation makes you look, think about, and touch the affected limb. This likely reduces the body perceptual disturbance in the brain which then is likely to decrease the pain from the CRPS.