3 Strategies for Managing Peripheral Neuropathy

You experience sudden, and unpredictable, shock-like sensations in your lower legs. Or maybe you’re dealing with numbness and tingling in your hands that are making everyday tasks a little more challenging.

Peripheral neuropathy, which involves damage to the nerves outside your central nervous system, is a challenging condition to deal with, as the 1-7% of the general population who struggle with it can tell you.

But if your peripheral neuropathy has shown up, our expert and experienced team of nerve health experts at Complete Neurological Care is here to help.

To start, we want to review a few effective strategies for dealing with peripheral neuropathy that can greatly improve your quality of life.

Identify — and address — the underlying cause

The first, and arguably the most important, step when you develop peripheral neuropathy is to figure out what’s behind the nerve damage.

As you might imagine, there are many roads to nerve damage, but one of the most common causes we see at our practice is diabetes. In fact, diabetes accounts for about 30% of all neuropathic pain. Viewing it from another angle, about half of people with diabetes will develop the condition.

So if diabetes has led to your peripheral neuropathy, it’s imperative that you manage the disease by controlling your blood sugar levels.

What about the other 70% of cases? Unfortunately, in 25-46% of cases, it’s idiopathic, which means there’s no known cause. That said, there are plenty of culprits that we can identify, such as:

• Trauma
• Peripheral artery disease
• Shingles
• Vitamin deficiency
• Alcoholism
• Complex regional pain syndrome
• HIV/AIDS

Even some medical treatments can lead to neuropathy, such as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery.

Our point here is that it’s very important that you come see us so we can identify — and address — what’s causing your neuropathic discomfort.

Get the right treatments 

Whether or not we’re able to pinpoint the cause of your neuropathy, our next goal is to make you more comfortable by addressing the symptoms. We have many tools in our arsenal for tackling neuropathic pain, such as:

• Pain medications
• Other medications, such as anti-seizure drugs or antidepressants
• Nerve blocks
• Radiofrequency ablation
• Vitamin infusions (B12 helps support nerve health)
• Neuromodulation, such as spinal cord or peripheral nerve stimulation

As you can see, you’re not without options when it comes to relieving your symptoms, and we work with you to find the right combination.

Work on the mental aspect

When people say that the pain is in your head, they’re actually on the right track despite their ill intent. When you have nerve damage, the pain signaling can become overactive, and the constant messaging between your brain and your peripheral nerves often becomes a well-worn path. 

We see this often in our practice — chronic pain that becomes its own condition after a while. To address this new pathology, we can still rely on the treatments we outlined above, but we also suggest that you take steps to target your brain.

Some of our patients try cognitive behavioral therapy to get out of the cycle of pain. Others have found that stress management practices like meditation and yoga can help.

Since pain is in your head, working on your mental health when you’re dealing with painful peripheral neuropathy is a very good idea.

If we target your condition from every angle possible, our goal is to get you back to a place where pain isn’t the center of your world.

For relief from peripheral neuropathy, please contact one of our offices in Boynton Beach, Boca Raton, or Margate, Florida, to schedule an appointment.