The following opinion piece was submitted to the New York Times following a Saturday Night Live skit that made fun of CRPS.

Cheap Shots Wound Disabled
By Wilson Hulley

In early May, Saturday Night Live's Amy Poehler fired a cheap shot when she said: "Paula Abdul announced she's been suffering for the past 25 years from an obscure disease known as complex regional pain syndrome otherwise known as the crazies." As someone who has suffered the intractable pain of reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD), also known as complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) for nearly 15 years, I was devastated and furious by the gross and intolerable cruelty she used to describe a disabling syndrome, which affects a portion of the 56+ million Americans with disabilities. I believe we should hold people who entertain, as well as influence, responsible for their comments.

I'm no emotional or intellectual lightweight, but the magnitude of my personal loss from CRPS makes me touchy. At age of 23, I developed the landmark marketing campaign that introduced the Philips cassette recording device; I also developed the US postal services "service dogs welcome" signage program nationally. In my 50+ years in the private and public sectors, I have worked with American icons such as Lee Iacocca, Bill Colby, Jus Dart, and Justin Dart. I have worked with three presidential administrations in very rewarding ways, including Special Assistant to the Director-ACTION, Special Assistant to the President 's Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities, Special Assistant to the Executive Director and Advisor to the Chairman and the President. However, in 1991 I developed CRPS, which sent my wonderful career and life down the tubes.

You may have read about CRPS. Paula Abdul explained recently in People magazine that her erratic behavior was not due to drugs, but because she had suffered the chronic pain of CRPS. Ms. Abdul was one of the few and incredibly lucky people whose syndrome went into remission; while she can still sing and dance on national television, I have to medicate the bottom of my feet three times a day so I can walk, and finding shoes that are tolerable isn't easy.

The McGill pain scale ranks CRPS pain higher than that experienced by cancer patients. Our bodies don't ache, they shiver and tremble. We can't bear to touch or be touched-you won't see us casually planting a kiss on someone we don't know- and traditionally relaxing stimuli, like taking a shower, burn like living hell. Our limbs feel like they are on fire, or have razor blades slicing through them and we even start thinking about the quickest way to kill ourselves.

The pain and the absolute terror that all of us who suffer chronic pain experience as we realize we are losing control of our lives make sleep impossible. CRPS leads to disability, disintegration of families, financial devastation, and all too often, suicide. Moreover, the syndrome is not rare -an estimated 500,000 to 700,000, probably even more, Americans suffer from this syndrome. We had hoped that Paula Abdul and her celebrity status would validate our experience and put an imprimatur on a syndrome that many of us have been told "is in our head." Instead, CRPS became a throw-away line in a one-act drama, spoofed nationally by Saturday Night Live, by people who didn't have a clue about the agony they mocked.

Making fun of disabled people used to be considered tasteless and it should remain so. I call on those writers, comedy and otherwise, to do some serious homework before depicting the plight of an entire segment of the disabled community with a single, thoughtless word.