My Struggle with Peripheral Neuropathy and How I Cured It

My first symptoms

It started about 2 1/2 years ago, in the spring of 2010. I woke up one morning and both of my hands felt strangely numb and tingly. It wasn’t a lightly-perceptible dull numbness that I could dismiss easily, but a painful tingling and throbbing sensation that let me know right away something was wrong.

For me, the numbing pain of peripheral neuropathy began in my hands. Image by Doug Wheller.

It was rather like the vibrating sensation that you feel in your hands after mowing the lawn for an hour, if you can relate to that. After you take a shower and you’re sitting in your living room, but can still feel that phantom vibration pulsating through your palms and fingers. That is the most apt description I can come up with for the type of pain I was feeling.

I tried to think of any possible causes but couldn’t come up with anything that made any sense. I hadn’t banged my hand on anything the day before, nor had I done anything physically stressful that could have bruised my hands. My first inclination was that I must have injured my hands somehow in the day previous and overnight the bruising must have set in, causing pain. My intuition told me that this explanation didn’t fit, but I didn’t have any other answers.

So I decided to just wait it out and hopefully it would go away on its own. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Hours turned in to days and still the tingling in my hands persisted. After about five days of this, I knew I was probably going to need to get professional medical advice. This kind of pain was definitely unnatural and I much needed to get to the bottom of it.

Attempting a self-diagnosis

They say that Google is your friend, which is true in most cases, so I used the search engine to research the issue. It became clear that my symptoms were most likely related to peripheral neuropathy, type of nerve damage. From the articles I read, it was apparent that the top two causes of painful tingling in the hands were long-term high blood sugar (caused by diabetes) and heavy metal toxicity (from air pollution, and especially eating certain types of ocean fish that contain too much mercury).

Both of those explanations made sense to me and it seemed that either one could be the possible cause. A few years previous, my doctor had told me that my blood sugar levels were in the prediabetic range. He advised that I didn’t need to take medication, but I did need to watch my diet and sugar intake. I thought I was doing a reasonably good job at this, but maybe it wasn’t enough? Now I wasn’t so sure.

In addition, I had even given up red meat and only ate chicken a couple times a week. I supplemented my diet with protein with lots of fish, such as the local shrimp and squid, and also ate quite a bit of canned tuna. My reading informed me that canned tuna was especially high in mercury because of industrial pollution and because the species was near the top of the oceanic food chain, allowing it to absorb the mercury contained in its prey.

So I decided to completely eliminate both of these possible causes of peripheral neuropathy from my diet. Hopefully, after a period of adjustment, the burning in my hands would fade away on its own. I was determined to consume a strict diet of absolutely no fish, no artificial sugars, and minimal amounts of processed foods. I based my healthy whole-grain diet on the Mediterranean diet, and did so fairly successfully. Unfortunately, my symptoms still did not recede.

Seeking professional help

After a few weeks of this without any subsiding of my symptoms, it became clear I was going to need professional medical help. My self-diagnosis and treatment wasn’t working, and the pain of peripheral neuropathy is just not something that I could live with. I needed to get to the bottom of it.

I live in Thailand, by the way, and getting medical care here can be a bit of an adventure and is definitely different from my home in the United States. One great benefit of it is that it is so affordable. You can see a doctor at any of the numerous public clinics around town for literally only a couple dollars.

The downside is that the language barrier can sometimes be a bit of an issue, and also that any complex or uncommon medical problems are sometimes more difficult to get diagnosed and treated. But for 90 percent of medical issues, Thai healthcare is great and I actually prefer it to US healthcare for number of reasons that I won’t get into here.

Anyway, I decided that my first visit would be to Banglamung Hospital, which is the inexpensive state run hospital in town. Many of their doctors are young interns, but I had been there a few times before and they had always been able to solve my problems. In addition, the costs are subsidized by the state and only a fraction of the cost of the private hospitals. They don’t have the best specialists there, but that is what I could use the private hospitals for, if that turned out to be necessary.

At my appointment, I was disappointed that the doctor seemed dismissive of my symptoms. His thoughts seemed to be the same as my first thoughts weeks before, that I must’ve bruised my hands during some kind of manual labor. I assured him that this could not be the case due to my lifestyle, and that anyways the symptoms had been persisting for several weeks which didn’t make sense if it was just a bruise. And, why were the symptoms symmetrical in both hands? It turns out that that is one of the hallmarks of peripheral neuropathy.

I tried to tell the doctor that I believed the symptoms were related to peripheral neuropathy, but the language barrier was too much. I then explained that I had previous trouble with my blood sugar levels, and he seemed to understand what I was getting at, but appeared skeptical of that because of my healthy and non diabetes-like appearance. In fact, I had gotten my blood sugar levels taken at this very hospital about six months before and they were in the normal range. Nothing made sense.

The doctor discharged me from the appointment rather dismissively, I felt, and told me to pick up my prescriptions at the pharmacy. It turned out that the prescriptions were for several of the first-line treatments for symptoms of peripheral neuropathy. Vitamin B tablets because nerve signals can be short-circuited by a deficiency of the vitamin. Topical nerve cream to rub in to the skin to diminish pain. And ibuprofen tablets, which hardly seemed to be a suitable long-term solution to this problem.

Peripheral Neuropathy Topical Skin Creams [table “4” not found /]

As I had suspected, these prescriptions proved to do little to mitigate the symptoms. I nevertheless continued on my stringent diet in hopes that eventually that would lead to a full recovery. Truthfully, I was getting a bit hopeless and a little desperate.

How I finally cured my peripheral neuropathy

If I wanted to seek further medical treatment, the next step would be to go to the more expensive and better staffed Bangkok Hospital. They have the best specialists in Thailand and I am sure that if any healthcare facility could get to the bottom of the situation in this country, they could.

But what could they really do about it, I thought. Peripheral neuropathy, I discerned from my research, was almost always caused by an environmental factor. Whether it was improper diet or environmental pollution, the solution involves changes in personal lifestyle or pollution exposure rather than any pill or treatment that a doctor or hospital could provide.

So I decided not to go to the private hospital yet and to continue treatment on my own. I knew that the pain itself would not cause further nerve damage. I decided to eat an almost completely regimented diet consisting of no artificial sugars, and as little natural sugar as I could stand. Just a little bit of fish, and no more canned tuna.

In the end, it took about three months of living with the burning and tingling in my hands, but eventually the peripheral neuropathy symptoms slowly dissipated and then disappeared. I was able to determine that in my case, the cause was definitely high blood sugar/diabetes.

I know this because even today the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy will come back temporarily if I do indulge myself and eat sugar. Occasionally, I will sneak an ice cream bar or something like that into my diet. Sometimes when I do that, the numbness in my hands will come back either within an hour or two after eating the sugary snack, or the following morning just like it did when I first got the initial symptoms of peripheral neuropathy some two years ago. Eating canned tuna and fish has proven to have no effect on my symptoms, so I have largely dismissed that as a cause in my case.

So I’m confident that the cause for me is diabetes and high blood sugar. By eating a very strict Mediterranean diet which is high in whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and olive oil I have been able to keep my symptoms at bay. I don’t eat any refined sugars at all, because that is what makes the symptoms come back. I have found that my body can tolerate natural sugars such as those found in fruit juices much better, and they are much less likely to cause symptoms.

Conclusion

If you, like me, have just started experiencing the painful symptoms of peripheral neuropathy, please follow the advice have outlined in this article and change your diet. The symptoms can be reversed; I am living proof of that. The only time peripheral neuropathy cannot be cured is when it has been ignored for too long and the nerve damage is too extensive to regenerate or recover.

Neuropathy is almost always caused by environmental factors that are under your control. Diet and exercise are the number one things you can manipulate in order to stem the nerve damage and mitigate symptoms. Even if you begin to feel hopeless or discouraged, remain persistent. The pain and the diminished quality of life that comes with peripheral neuropathy does not have to be permanent.

Thanks for taking the time to read this quite long article, as it turns out. I have written it in the hopes that it may be of help, insight, or encouragement to you in your journey. Take care, and I truly wish you the best of luck with your own fight with this terrible scourge.