Diabetic nerve pain is not limited to tingling, and can be experienced in toes, feet, legs, hands, arms, and fingers. It can also involve indigestion, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, uncomfortable constipation, dizziness, and general weakness.

But diabetic nerve pain of the genuinely direct kind hits in several different ways. Peripheral neuropathy, considered the most common diabetic nerve pain, involves pain or loss of feeling in your toes, feet, legs, hands, and arms. In peripheral neuropathy—which is also known as distal symmetric or sensorimotor neuropathy—your feet or legs could be affected first, including numbness or insensitivity to pain or temperature as well as tingling, burning, or prickling feelings, sharp cramps, and loss of balance. And, these discomforts are usually worse at night according to numerous analysts. You may also experience muscular weakening and reflex loss, particularly around your ankles, and that may affect how you walk or provoke such abnormalities as hammertoe or midfoot collapse, and blistering is possible around numb foot areas because pressure or other injury is not detected. Delayed treatment can indeed spread any infection to the bone and force foot amputation.

Proximal neuropathy causes thigh, hip, or buttock pain and often leads to leg weakness. And, focal neuropathy provokes sudden weakness in single or groups of nerves and can cause either muscular weakness or pain, or both. Also known as femoral neuropathy or diabetic amyotrophy, it usually begins on one side of your body and is more common among type 2 diabetes sufferers and in older adults who have any type diabetes. This condition can make it difficult for you to stand up without help, and treatment is usually needed, with recovery time varying according to the kind of nerve damage involved.

Focal neuropathy affects specific nerves in the head, torso, or leg, and can cause aching behind one eye, one-sided facial paralysis (Bell’s palsy), pain in the front of your thigh, or sever pain in your lower back or your pelvis. In fact, the chest or abdominal pains are sometimes mistaken for heart disease or appendicitis. But you can also experience chest, stomach, or side pain, or pain in your outer shin or inner foot. This type of diabetic nerve pain is unpredictable and usually affects older adults. The good news is that it often improves itself over weeks or months and is unlikely to cause long-term damage, according to several medical analyses.

Diabetics who think they have nerve-related pain should consult their doctors at soon as possible to determine the actual cause and appropriate treatments. Doctors will test for nerve damage in several ways, including but not limited to using different items to touch or prick possibly affected areas and treat immediate symptoms such as previously-unfelt cuts or sores thanks to numbnesses.

Doctors and other health clinicians now recommend diabetics to undergo comprehensive annual examinations aimed directly at checking for diabetic neuropathies, and often as not medications are prescibed to control and reduce this problem which, like diabetes itself, can be controlled but not cured. Other tests can include electromyography to determine your type and extent of diabetic nerve damage; checking for heart rate variables; and, ultrasound, usually to guard against diabetic nerve damage causing other discomforts among internal organs such as your bladder.

Some medications deployed against diabetic nerve pain include tricyclic antidepressants (you do not need to be a diagnosed clinical or manic depressive for these medications to be prescribed for diabetic nerve pain), anticonvulsants, or opiods. In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now approved duloxetine and pregabalin as specific medications to treat severe peripheral neuropathy.

Diabetic nerve pain is a condition that plaques about 60% of the people who contract the disease. The pain is actually caused by diabetic neuropathy which means a disorder caused by diabetes that affects the nerves. The levels of pain from this condition can range from mild irritation all the way up to intolerable. Like the disease of diabetes itself, there is no cure for diabetic nerve pain, the only option is to control the pain with various methods described below.

Diabetic Nerve Pain Diagnoses

Diabetic peripheral neuropathy is the most common cause of pain from diabetes. This means the problem lies predominantly in the extremities such as the finger, toes, feet, hands, and arms and legs. The localization of pain in these areas makes sense because the extremities are the first parts of the body that are affected by the poor circulation caused by the disease of diabetes.

If you have pain that you feel is associated with your diabetic condition then you need to contact your doctor or health care provider immediately so he or she can determine the cause. Often times tingling or other non-normal feelings are a precursor to pain so they should be checked out also. When the doctor checks for diabetic neuropathy he or she will of course focus on pain but will also look at other indicators. It is important to asses the health of the skin, circulation system, muscles, and bones along with the actual sensations felt. The feelings in the appendage are tested by touching different items to the area. One method is to lightly rub a monofilament line such as fishing line on the skin to see if it is noticed. The physician may also lightly prick the feet to see if there is if the pain sensation systems are still active.

Losing the ability to feel pain may seem like a relief but in reality it can be very dangerous for someone suffering the effects of diabetic peripheral neuropathy. If the person can no longer feel pain they won’t know when something is injuring the foot. Thus a sore or cut can appear on the foot and the patient won’t even know it is there. It may then go untreated to the point that a major infection sets in. At this point, if the infection can’t be brought under control, the only recourse may be amputation.

If you are suffering from diabetes be sure you have a comprehensive foot exam at least yearly to check for neuropathy in the foot. If you are diagnosed with the problem you will know to take special care of your foot.

Controlling Diabetic Nerve Pain

As with the disease of diabetes itself there is no cure for diabetic peripheral neuropathy there are only control efforts that can be made. The primary control is to keep your diabetes in check and your blood sugar within the prescribed bounds so the damage is not done to your extremities. The diabetic pain from this condition can be very debilitating and you should do everything possible to keep from having to deal with it.

Once the pain is present there are several methods that can be tried for relief. These include such things as antidepressants and anticonvulsants which seem to have positive effects for many people. Opiod type and opiod like drugs are also prescribed but they just mask the pain they do nothing to actually treat it. There is no cure for this debilitation condition, the best a person can hope to do is deal with the diabetic nerve pain is such a way as to live as normal a life as possible.