Imagine living with chronic pain, numbness, and tingling in your hands or feet. Simple tasks like walking, typing, or buttoning a shirt become daily struggles. You've tried medications, but the side effects are almost as bad as the symptoms. Your doctor says there's nothing more they can do—that you'll just have to learn to live with it.

This is the reality for many patients who have been told that they have diabetic peripheral neuropathy. But what if there was another option? A treatment that could potentially reduce pain, restore sensation, and improve your quality of life?

Many patients who have been told they have diabetic peripheral neuropathy, or patients that have symptoms that are consistent with diabetic peripheral neuropathy, may actually have more than one cause that contributes to the pain and numbness that characterizes the symptoms most frequently diagnosed as diabetic peripheral neuropathy.    

One of the common factors that contributes to these symptoms is too much pressure placed on the nerves that then cuts the blood circulation off to the nerves. Diabetic peripheral neuropathy is an extremely complicated topic, and entire books are written on the biochemical changes that occur on the cellular level that can develop from having too much sugar in our blood. Long-term, these changes are not great for our bodies, hence the strong push to control our sugar levels as best as we can in order to optimize our health. This is the fundamental first step—get the sugar into a normal range.  

Imagine that you have done this the best you can; you are better off than you were a year ago, your primary care doctor or endocrinologist is “proud” of you for working hard, but you still have pain or severe numbness in the foot. NOW WHAT? 

It has been demonstrated for around 20 years that one of the major contributors to the symptoms that are diagnosed as diabetic peripheral neuropathy—the burning, the tingling, the pins and needles, the numbness, and loss of balance—is that there may be too much pressure on the nerves that travel to the feet and the hands. If there is too much pressure on the nerves, then the nerves may be compressed, pinched, squished, narrowed, or trapped in the tunnels that they run through.  

By identifying and relieving pressure points along damaged nerves, Dr. Eric H. Williams, a peripheral nerve surgeon in Baltimore, has helped many patients overcome the debilitating effects of neuropathy. As a surgeon, his job is to simply try to figure out which patients who show up in the office have pinched nerves in their hands and feet due to too much pressure on them and which do not. He is essentially trying to determine if he can help a patient by decompressing or relieving the pressure points along these nerves that are already unhappy due to a history of diabetes. 

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