About 20 Million people in the United States suffer from Peripheral Neuropathy. In this video, Dr. Tony discusses causes, symptoms, and treatment options.
Video Transcript
Hi guys. Dr. Tony DeRamus. Today we are going to talk about peripheral neuropathy. As many of you probably have heard of this condition it’s a very debilitating condition. About 20 million people in the country suffer with this today. Let’s discuss what are some of the causes, some of the symptoms of this, and also some of the treatments outside of the medications that we hear about today.
I guess an easy way to explain this is we have these tiny little nerves, and beside the nerve we have these even smaller little blood vessels that will feed the nerve the nutrients that it needs. In some of these disorders like this the blood supply is diminished and then the nerves begin to die off because they’re not getting nutrition. It would be similar if we had say a tree with the blood vessels being the root of the tree and the leaves being the actual nerves. Eventually if that root didn’t supply the nutrients to the leaves they would die off as well.
One of the most common symptoms that you will hear about is a numbness and a tingling that occurs in the bottom of the feet, or into the hands, and sometimes as I mentioned into the internal organs as well. Some of the other symptoms is obviously pain is a big factor with this. We have temperature changes as well. Probably one of the most debilitating symptom is loss of feeling which then gives us in essence balance problems. We know that in people that are 65 and above that one of the most common causes of injury are falls. So, balance issues and falling down. I think roughly 65% of all people with peripheral neuropathy have some type of balance issue, and about half of those will have some type of injurious type of a fall.
There are many types of treatments that we use in our office. One is called the ReBuilder. It’s somewhat like a TENS unit, but it is a specialized waveform more like a micro-current type of a unit. What this device was designed to do is to actually regenerate and help rebuild the peripheral nerves. Specifically, what we call the long diameter afferent nerves that are responsible for things like light touch, vibration so you can feel that, and then what we call drag which is something that is just going across the bottom of the extremity, the foot or the hand. The ReBuilider is relatively simple. This is what is called the 2407 model. We hook it up. We put it to a certain intensity and just let it do its job.
We profiled the MLS cutting edge laser in one of our other videos. A lot of people ask about the laser can you feel the laser? You cannot feel this type of laser. This is going to be one of the absolute best tools that we can use in helping with peripheral neuropathy. One of the main reasons why is because remember we talked about this tree and these vessels not supplying blood to the nerve and giving it the nutrients. Well, what the laser does is it will help produce and increase nitric oxide which is a vasodilator meaning that it will actually expand the vessels supplying the blood and just kind of open the water hoses per se and just flood the nerves with the nutrients that it needs over time.
There is no way we could cover all the different causes of peripheral neuropathy. In fact, there are probably a hundred different types. We covered alcoholism and diabetes, but you also have environmental toxins you deal with, medications. If you’re experiencing any of the symptoms that we talked about today I encourage you to get in here. Let’s go through our neuropathy severity evaluation and let’s determine whether or not you can even be a candidate for the types of therapies that we use. We have about 80% to 85% success rate with this because we’re very selective on who goes through our program. Call Sandstone or schedule your comprehensive exam with x-rays online. Let’s see if we can help. Get in here. Let’s get your life back.
