Avoid pain medication whenever possible, or use it only when necessary. Keeping your body in the proper position or keeping bed linens off a tender body part may help control pain.

For additional information and support, see: www.neuropathy.org.

You can fully recover from peripheral neuropathy if your health care provider can find the cause and successfully treat it, and if the damage does not affect the entire nerve cell.

The amount of disability varies. Some people have no disability, while others have a partial or complete loss of movement, function, or feeling. Nerve pain may be uncomfortable and may last for a long time.

Occasionally sensorimotor polyneuropathy causes severe, life-threatening symptoms.

• Deformity
• Injury to feet (caused by bad shoes or hot water when stepping into the bathtub)
• Numbness
• Pain
• Trouble walking
• Weakness

Call your health care provider if you have loss of movement or feeling in a part of your body. Early diagnosis and treatment increase the chance of controlling the symptoms.

Images

Central nervous system

• < Page
1 2
• >

Review Date: 02/06/2010
Reviewed By: David C. Dugdale, III, MD, Professor of Medicine, Division of General Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine; and Luc Jasmin, MD, PhD, Department of Neurolosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, and Department of Anatomy at UCSF, San Francisco, CA. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M., Inc.

A.D.A.M., Inc. is accredited by URAC, also known as the American Accreditation HealthCare Commission (www.urac.org)