If you lose feeling in a particular part of your body, lose control of your muscles or have abnormal nerve sensations such unexplained pain, burning in your feet, tingling or itching, you usually have a neuropathy: nerve damage. Nerves can be damaged by something pinching or stretching them, such as excessive pressure from moving a limb repeatedly (as in carpal tunnel syndrome in your hand), scar tissue, or a disc problem in your back. Nerves can also be damaged by diabetes; lack of a vitamin (such as B12 in pernicious anemia); infections such as Lyme disease, shingles and herpes; poisonings by substances such as mercury or lead, or by diseases such as multiple sclerosis.<\/p>\n
Pain in your thumb and three fingers next to it is usually caused by a pinched nerve in your palm called carpal tunnel syndrome, but all cases of neuropathy can be caused by generalized diseases. At the very minimum, your doctor should order a vitamin B12 level to check for pernicious anemia, a hemoglobin A1C to check for diabetes, a Lyme antibody to check for infectious diseases spread by tick bites, and herpes titres to see if you have had a recent infection with that virus. You should never ignore a neuropathy because many causes are controllable before you suffer permanent damage to your nerves. If you have diabetes, see my report on treatment of insulin resistance<\/a>. If you have pernicious anemia, take B12 pills. If you have herpes<\/a>, take acyclovir, and if you have Lyme disease<\/a>, I recommend that you take long term antibiotics. Severe pain from your neuropathy may be treated it with an anticonvulsant pill called Tegretol (200 mg three times a day) and topical 0.025% capsaicin cream<\/a> three times a day.<\/p>\n Checked \u00a07\/12\/17<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you lose feeling in a particular part of your body, lose control of your muscles or have abnormal nerve sensations such unexplained pain, burning in your feet, tingling or itching, you usually have a neuropathy: nerve damage. Nerves can be damaged by something pinching or stretching them, such as excessive pressure from moving a limb repeatedly (as in carpal tunnel syndrome in your hand), scar tissue, or a disc problem in your back. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1023,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-morehealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}