Neuropathy, Is It Killing Your Hands and/or Feet?
There is a new HOPE for those that suffer due to Peripheral Neuropathy!
Peripheral Neuropathy is widespread, afflicting an estimated 20 million people in the United States. If someone is diabetic they have a 50% chance of having Peripheral Neuropathy. Many people whom are on cholesterol lowering medicine are also burdened with this disease.
What exactly is Peripheral Neuropathy?
Peripheral Neuropathy is the term used to describe damage to the nerves of the peripheral nervous system, that is the nerves that are not in the brain or spinal cord.
The nerves of the peripheral nervous system have 3 main parts so to speak, they are:
Cell body-Also known as the Soma-It is the largest part of the cell and is the control center of that nerve. It is where the genetic material (DNA) is located.
Dendrites- These are slender branch like extensions of a nerve cell that conducts impulses from adjacent cells inward toward the Cell Body.
Axon- This is the thick branch of the nerve cell, it is connected to the Cell Body and carries the impulses or electrical signals away from the body to other structures for communication. This is the part of the nerve cell most often damaged in Peripheral Neuropathy.
What symptoms are associated with Peripheral Neuropathy?
Symptoms usually begin way before the person afflicted ever realizes that they have a problem. It is because our brains are dynamic and can inhibit our ability to perceive these first symptoms of Peripheral Neuropathy.
Most commonly, peripheral neuropathy starts in the longest nerves — the ones that reach to your toes. Symptoms vary, depending on which types of nerves are affected. Signs and symptoms may include:
Loss of reflexes
Loss of strength
Gradual loss of sensation, numb hands, numb feet.
However as time passes and the damage accumulates the symptoms become much more pronounced and the brain must allow for the warning signs to be acknowledged. These symptoms include:
Numbness spreads upward into the numb arms and numb legs
Tingling hands tingling feet feelings
Burning hand, burning feet sensations
Electric shock hands pain and electric shock feet pain
Shooting hand pain and shooting feet pain and/or Stabbing like hand pains and stabbing like feet pain
Inability to achieve or sustain erections
Extreme sensitivity to touch, even light touch
Lack of coordination
Bowel or bladder problems if autonomic nerves are affected
What confuses most doctors about Peripheral Neuropathy is that each patient will describe their symptoms in their own individual language of ‘pain’. This can easily become unsettling to any doctor not trained in the recognition and treatment of various Peripheral Neuropathy symptomatology, especially someone whom, instead of focusing on Peripheral Neuropathy, becomes “spread thin” due to their treating many different and varied types of health disorders, basically seeing anything that walks into their office.
This makes it next to impossible for these doctors to realize and appreciate that these different patient subjective complaints are really all about the same problem, that being Peripheral Neuropathy.
So, in the end it is you, the patient whom pays the price. You begin to shuffle from doctor to doctor, being given ever stronger, and more dangerous drugs, until you are completely drugged and so “out of it” that you are unable to function in the same capacity as before, not unlike a person addicted to common street drugs
Hi, I'm Dr. Walter K Crooks and I understand that you don’t want to be like this, you didn’t ask for this demon in your life. I empathize with your dilemma. You are taught to trust medical doctors from a young age. They are supposed to protect and make you well again.
However in this day and age, the age of taking the easiest path to success, most doctors’ education ends whenever they graduate medical school. The only “learning” that they get is usually from the pharmaceutical companies sales reps that are calling on the doctor’s offices, pushing their drugs to be prescribed. Drugs, that at least in the case of Peripheral Neuropathy, do not reverse or even stop the progression of the disease.
The next time you are at your doctor’s office for an appointment just ask them to give you some documented, non-drug company backed, research that shows that whatever they are doing for your Peripheral Neuropathy has show any cessation or reversal of the disease. Then sit back and watch how they react.
So, what exactly am I saying? Are there any drugs out there that cure Peripheral Neuropathy?
Ready for this? Absolutely no medication can cure your Peripheral Neuropathy.
Yes, there are drugs that can alleviate your symptoms, however your Peripheral Neuropathy is still there and odds are it is getting worse by the day.
Why is it that your Peripheral Neuropathy continues to progress even though you take the drugs your medical doctor has prescribed you and have changed your diet? Because in medicine the rule of thumb is to treat the diseases symptoms and due to the insurance companies rules, the doctor has no incentive to find out what is the true cause of your Peripheral Neuropathy. This is because they must follow a type of treatment protocol that does not take into account the individuality of the patient, instead it looks at the grouping of symptoms and basis the treatment solely on that.
If someone goes to their MD and asks them to prescribe something to make them able to feel their feet again, guess what? The doctor is not going to be able to do that. Sure, they can give you something to decrease the brains perception of the pain of Peripheral Neuropathy, these drugs that numb the brains ability to perceive the nerve damage that is happening all day every day, but that is about all they can do.
Remember, currently, ordinary medicine has NO cure for Peripheral Neuropathy. The extremely powerful drugs dispensed to patients DO NOT TREAT the NERVE DAMAGE! They numb the brain to numb the pain. Most patients cannot tolerate a drugged existence but feel they have NO OTHER OPTION against this horrifying pain.
Do not lose sight of common sense. Think of this: If your refrigerator began to malfunction, causing your food to spoil, and you called on a service man to repair it and a week, day, hour, minute later it broke down again, ruining all of your food, would you call on that same service man to repair it for a new charge? Of course you wouldn’t, then why in the world do you continue to go to the same doctors, receiving the same care with little to no results?
If it is because that is who is on your insurance coverage let me say this. Insurance companies keep inept doctors in practice. In other areas of business, those that can’t produce or offer what the public expects do not thrive in business. If a doctor where to solely rely on patients to pay for their care out of their own pockets, how long do think it would take before the doctor whom never changes the treatment plan for the patient, and in reality has a “cookie cutter” approach to their treatment of patients with Peripheral Neuropathy went out of business?
Don’t treat your health and life less than that of an ordinary kitchen appliance…One definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting a different result…..
No comments:
Post a Comment