Feet First

You have a diagnosis and a prescription. What you do not have is a plan.

It is eleven at night and you are standing on the kitchen tile because the cold tile is the only thing that helps. You have a bottle on the counter you have not opened, a drawer full of things you bought at two in the morning, and a browser tab open to a clinic that wants six thousand dollars up front.

Your neurologist sees you for twenty minutes twice a year. You have the other 8,700 hours. This is the operator's manual for those hours.

Here is the fact that reorganizes everything. For the standard first-line medications used in nerve pain, published research suggests that between four and eight people need to take a given drug for one of them to get substantial relief. That number is not discouraging - it is liberating. It means a drug that failed you was arithmetic, not a verdict. And it means that if the pills are carrying that modest a load, something else is carrying the rest.

That something else is you, and the parts nobody explained.

Inside this book:

• The two-minute daily foot check - with a decision rule for every single thing you might find, including the one finding that means a phone call within twenty-four hours and that most people mistake for a bruise
• How to actually run a medication trial, with a written protocol, a ramp schedule, a defined success target, and a stop rule - the four things missing when a drug "doesn't work"
• A progressive balance program you can start today at a kitchen counter, aimed at the fall that ends independence, because the fall is what takes the house - not the pain
• The seven-question filter that lets you evaluate any supplement, clinic, laser, seminar, or device aimed at you in under two minutes, for the rest of your life
• The truth about nerve supplements, including the extremely common ingredient in "nerve support" formulas that is itself a recognized cause of peripheral neuropathy - go check your own bottle tonight
• The federal footwear benefit most readers with diabetes qualify for and have never used, with the exact phone script
• What a complete diagnostic workup contains, so your search for a missed cause can finally have an ending
• Separate sections for diabetic neuropathy, chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, and idiopathic neuropathy - plus a one-page letter you can hand to the family members who keep telling you to walk more and to sit down