A Guide to Treating Diabetic Neuropathy

For the 38.4 million Americans who live with diabetes, the disease is one thing, but the complications are often the real challenge. From vision loss to cardiovascular disease, diabetes can cast a wide net — and an often painful one when there’s peripheral neuropathy involved.

This complication is a common one and nearly half of people with diabetes have some degree of nerve damage, which is what neuropathy refers to. And this nerve damage can lead to no small amount of pain.

Since November is National Diabetes Month, our team at Pain Medicine Consultants wants to review the extensive toolkit we have for treating diabetic neuropathy. 

As with most pain, there are many different roads to relief from diabetic neuropathy, and we’re sure to have one that will bring you much-needed comfort.

A quick look at peripheral neuropathy related to diabetes

When you have diabetes, your body doesn’t produce enough insulin and/or has developed insulin resistance, which can lead to higher-than-normal glucose levels in your bloodstream. These high levels of blood sugar can wreak havoc on the blood vessels that service your peripheral nerves and the nerves themselves.

This nerve damage often occurs in your lower extremities (lower legs and feet) and, less commonly, your upper extremities (arms and hands).

There are many reasons we’re concerned about neuropathy, and we want to cover two here. First, this nerve damage can lead to pain, as well as numbness, tingling, and muscle weakness. Second, neuropathy can set the stage for diabetic foot ulcers, which are slow-healing wounds prone to infection.

Finding relief from diabetic neuropathy

When there’s nerve damage, you can feel different types of pain, but most of our patients describe it as shooting, burning, or stabbing. In other words, it’s not very pleasant.

Since we’re a pain management clinic, our first goal is to relieve your pain, but we also understand the benefits of disease management, especially when it comes to diabetes. 

First, we recommend managing your blood sugar levels with the help of your primary care provider so you can slow or even halt the neuropathy.

As you work toward better managing your diabetes, we can help manage your neuropathic pain with:

• Painkillers
• Anti-seizure medications
• Antidepressant medications
• Corticosteroid injections
• Nerve blocks
• COX-2 inhibitors — nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications
• Alpha-2-adrenergic agonists like Clonidine
• Medical cannabis
• Ketamine
• Neuromodulation through spinal cord stimulation

As you can see, we have a good list of options to work with because we understand that each patient can respond to these treatments differently. While one patient might find relief from peripheral neuropathy pain through antidepressants, this approach might not be effective for the next.

Our point here is that we work with you until we find a solution, or combination of solutions, that brings you meaningful relief.

We also recommend lifestyle changes that can help improve peripheral neuropathy, such as:

• Becoming more active
• Improving your diet
• Reducing stress

Between some healthy lifestyle tweaks and our extensive arsenal of treatment options, we feel confident that we can help you manage your neuropathic pain.

To figure out which combination of treatments will work best for your diabetic neuropathy pain, we invite you to contact us at one of our offices in Pleasant Hill, Corte Madera, or Pleasanton, California, to schedule a consultation.