Hello, I am Dr. Randall Gates. I am a chiropractor, as well as being a board certified chiropractic neurologist.
We work with patients who have have peripheral neuropathy on a very common basis. It’s actually the majority of our case load. What we are seeing is that, in our clinical practice certain neuropathy patients can be helped.
So lets pause there. You are watching this because you likely know something about pre-diabetes and peripheral neuropathy. You may know more than what your doctors know about this condition. I’m not saying that in a denigration fashion. It’s just that this is a relatively new finding and we will get to that.
So what is peripheral neuropathy? Peripheral neuropathy is basically where patients commonly have numbness, tingling and or burning in their feet, maybe spreading up to their knees and maybe involving their hands. Yes, there are many other kinds of peripheral neuropathy but they’re not what we are commonly talking about here.
So for those with blood sugar disorders, we’ve known for a long period of time that diabetes causes peripheral neuropathy. The current statistics estimate that for those withperipheral neuropathy, diabetes counts for half of that. In our clinical experience many types of patients with peripheral neuropathy are told it’s your diabetes half the time or we don’t know the cause the other half of the time. We can run lots of lab tests but we are not going to figure it out. You just have to go home and live with it because there is really nothing we can do for you anyway.
Those are commonly the accounts patients get from their medical peripheral neuropathy or their medical general practitioner. While that may have been true some time ago, a new research is coming out that patients with peripheral neuropathy can be helped. So I’m just going to stop there.
So now lets go into pre-diabetes. The literature started coming out late 1990s early 2000s. This pre-diabetic peripheral neuropathy has really been discovered by two gentlemen out of the Universtiy of Utah, Dr. Gordon Smith and Dr. Robinson Singleton. These are two neurologists from the University of Utah, which is a specialty center, where they started showing that pre-diabetes can cause peripheral problems.
We thought diabetes counts for half of peripheral neuropathy patients in America. They are now showing that pre-diabetes can account for a significant percentage. This statistic varies from 10% but I’ve seen it as high as 30%, which I think is a little too high. Ore-diabetes can account for a significant percentage of those cases of idopathic peripheral neuropathy or cryptogenic peripheral neuropathies, which basically means we don’t know the cause of it. So we are now seeing that pre-diabetes can cause peripheral neuropathy.
How does it do that? Well, when someone has pre-diabetes, in essence what happens is that they have periods where their blood sugar goes too high. It is not too high all the time as is commonly the case in an unmanaged case of diabetes. So let’s say you go have your feast of pasta and bread, you go to a nice Italian dinner, and if you are moving into a pre-diabetic state there is a possibility that you just cant make enough insulin to get that sugar into yourself. So insulin takes sugar from our blood stream and puts it into our muscle cells or our fat cells.
So in essence, in pre-diabetes you eat that high carbohydrate meal and sugar goes a little too high. When that sugar goes a little too high, there are three tissues in the body that can’t get sugar out of them. The retina, the kidney and peripheral nerves and nerve tissue basically. If you can’t get sugar out, the problem is that sugar gets converted into a substance that attracts water. So now those with pre-diabetes, we are seeing that they can pull water into the nerves. That can cause the nerves to start to dysfunction.
They are also seing in cases of pre-diabetic peripheral neuropathy. The nerves aren’t actually dying or dead as they see in diabetic peripheral neuropathy, it’s just that the nerves are just kind of swollen. Unfortunately with those with pre-diabetes as you probably well know, commonly they suffer with painful burning sensations and stabbing pains and things of that nature.
It’s not the garden variety typical numbness and tingling sort of neuropathy that in other peripheral neuropathies. It is a painful neuropathy and that is why it is terms a small fiber neuropathy. There are many types of big nerves, like the sciatic nerve.
Some are larger in diameter, some are smaller in diameter. Those that are larger in diameter sense things like which direction your toes are going. Those that are small in diameter encode things like pain temperature, and autonomic function. We’re going to do something autonomic neuropathy coming up.
Those three things. Autonomic function basically involves blood flow to your feet. Are your feet blue? Are your feet red? Do they turn cherry red when your feet are burning? That’s all really important because what is happening there in pre-diabetic peripheral neuropathy is, we are seeing t sugar is going into those nerve tissues, especially the small fiber nerves and they swell more for a reason we won’t get into. Basically they don’t have as much coating around them.
Then because they are swelling the nerves discharge and because they encode pain, now you are getting an abundance of pain signals being sent to your spine your feet most commonly and now your feet are burning. You may be taking Gabapentin, Lyrica, other forms of medications that calm down the pain, because this can be one of the most miserable forms of peripheral neuropathy.
I want to say that we are writing a book right now called “Peripheral neuropathy successes stories,” Dr. Rutherford and I. In this book I site studies where they are now showing that you can actually go on and shock these nerves back into life. You can shock these nerves and make them work better, which is really interesting. However, those results are short lived. Mayber a couple of days, and then the nerves go back to their old pattern.
They’ve done studies, Dr. Singleton and Smith citing that if you control your diabetes through diet and excercise, there’s a possibility that your pre-diabetic peripheral neuropathy may go away. That’s interesting in and on itself.
What we see is a complement of those two factors together between peripheral neurostimulation and addressing the underlying medical cause and we properly selected a patient … I’m not saying this is a cure for everybody, but we have a selection process. If we do that effectively, we see that their peripheral neuropathy symtpoms can often abate or go away.
So what does this mean for you? What this means is that … One other thing. You need to know that commonly medical doctors are not aware that pre-diabetes can cause peripheral neuropathy. We’re even treating a medical doctor right now who came to us and said “I went to UC Davis, I don’t have pre-diabetes, and they said pre-diabetes can’t cause peripheral neuropathy.”
Well the fact of the matter is … maybe we can attach this clip word of article somehow to our website, on pre-diabetes and peripheral neuropathy. That would be awesome, just because I’ve attached like 30 references regarding Dr. Smith’s work, Dr. Robinson Singleton’s work about this subject. Because it’s irrefutable now.
Or if we can’t attach it on the website, you can chime in to our website powerhealthtalk.com and we’ll get back to you, we’ll send you the link. Bottom line is, even though your medical doctor may not be … or even your neurologist may not even know that pre-diabetes can cause peripheral neuropathy. This is world found entity, it’s irrefutable now. It needs to be paid attention to.
So for any other questions on this subject, go to powehealthtalk.com. We have an hour long broadcasts on a variety of subjects that you can find interesting. You can also direct questions to our Facebook page For Power Health, and we’ll go from there. Thank you for watching and please send us any questions. Thank you.