Perhaps the most frustrating, but real issue surrounding patients, who suffer from peripheral neuropathy and indeed many types of chronic pain, is that more often than not, there are multiple underlying causes.
As you probably know, life tends to be in accumulation of experiences, unfortunately sometimes including trauma and illnesses.
All of these things have consequences, some of which will not show up for many years. You probably also know that things that are very easy to ignore at 25, now become impossible to ignore at 65 and beyond.
One of the things that concerns me while treating many neuropathy patients is when clinicians and patients focus exclusively trying to find the “one” cause of their pain, burning, tingling numbness or other neuropathy symptoms.
The reason for this is quite simple. Most commonly, patients develop peripheral neuropathy as the result of multiple factors.
For example, a common scenario is an overweight smoker who had a history of back surgery. Perhaps they even took statin medications.
The reality is, is that all these things are risk factors for the development of chronic pain, but often peripheral neuropathy.
So you can see unless all these factors are addressed the patient is unlikely to significantly improve.
Worse yet is when doctors and other caregivers are not familiar with this all too common scenario.
I honestly believe this is the reason why so many patients receive symptomatic medication, yet no constructive advice on how to manage, let alone possibly beat their peripheral neuropathy.
So the best advice I can give you, is to try and understand everything that may be contributing to your current situation.
But also understand how very important it is NOT to delay proper treatment. The longer the delay, the more difficult peripheral neuropathy becomes to manage.
I find this is also why the biggest neuropathy treatment successes comes when implementation of EARLY research based neuropathy treatment, including things like NDGen neurostimulation, manual therapy, therapeutic nutrition and laser (LLLT/LED) therapy can have a profound impact on my patients outcomes, no matter what the underlying cause(s) might turn out to be.
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