No matter how old you are or the health conditions you may have, stretching should be incorporated into your daily routine – even if you have peripheral neuropathy or nerve pain. In fact, stretching is an essential part of peripheral neuropathy treatment because it can get your blood flowing.
While treating the underlying problem that is causing neuropathy is the first step, exercise can help with strength, balance and range of motion. Proper stretching can help with neuropathy of the feet.
Regular exercise, such as walking three times a week, can reduce neuropathy pain, improve muscle strength and help control blood sugar levels. Gentle routines such as yoga and tai chi might also help. Quit smoking.
Severe cases may require medical care but for many patients, gentle exercises that target the affected area can help relieve minor nerve pain. These stretches lessen the pressure placed on the nerve and loosen the surrounding muscles. Plan to make these exercises part of your daily routine, two or three times per day.
Usually a peripheral neuropathy can't be cured, but you can do a lot of things to prevent it from getting worse. If an underlying condition like diabetes is at fault, your healthcare provider will treat that first and then treat the pain and other symptoms of neuropathy.
Nutritional or vitamin imbalances, alcoholism, and exposure to toxins can damage nerves and cause neuropathy. Vitamin B12 deficiency and excess vitamin B6 are the best known vitamin-related causes. Several medications have been shown to occasionally cause neuropathy.
Stretching helps to reduce the pain and tension in your muscles, both of which can affect neuropathy. There are a number of different stretches you can do, including stretching your calf muscles. A seated stretch is your best option if the neuropathy has affected your balance.
Significant stress put on a paralyzed muscle through stretching or strengthening can delay and may even prevent full nerve recovery. Such treatment should not be started until the late stage of nerve regeneration when progressive strength return can be seen.
Peripheral nerves move and deform during stretching. Pain pressure thresholds increase following stretching.
DOs and DON'Ts in Managing Peripheral Neuropathy:
Exercise, eat healthy meals, lose weight, and quit smoking. DO avoid repetitive movements, cramped positions, toxic chemicals, and too much alcohol—things that cause nerve damage.
The symptoms of peripheral neuropathy may lessen or go away over time, but in some cases they never go away. These are some ways to learn to live with it: Use pain medicines as your doctor prescribes them.
Numerous clinical studies have found that magnesium has beneficial effects in patients suffering from neuropathic pain, dysmenorrhea, tension headache, acute migraine attack, and others.
Whether or not neuropathy can be reversed depends on the cause of the nerve damage. In some cases, the pain may go away entirely. In others, nerve damage may be permanent. For example, when neuropathy is caused by an infection, symptoms might go away completely when the infection is treated.
If the injury is large or close to the cell body, it can induce neuronal death. However, if the nerve section or the crush injury is distant from the neuron cell body, nerve fibers can regenerate.
It has been shown that foot massage intervention reduces the patients' pain levels and has a positive effect on their sleep quality. Accordingly, foot massage can be recommended to patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to reduce their peripheral neuropathy-related pain and improve their sleep quality.
How do I know the nerve is recovering? As your nerve recovers, the area the nerve supplies may feel quite unpleasant and tingly. This may be accompanied by an electric shock sensation at the level of the growing nerve fibres; the location of this sensation should move as the nerve heals and grows.
While the general benefits of aerobic and flexibility exercises are well-known, increasing movement and heart-rate are particularly important for people suffering with peripheral neuropathy. Physical activity can improve blood circulation, which strengthens nerve tissues by increasing the flow of oxygen.
What can slow neuropathy's progression—at least for many patients—is correction of the underlying cause. If the patient's neuropathy is caused primarily by diabetes or prediabetes, strict control of blood glucose levels through diet, exercise and medication can do the trick.
Treatments for Neuropathy
However, in some situations, symptoms of neuropathy may lessen but not completely go away. For example, nerve injury caused by radiation often does not recover well. Neuropathy caused by chemotherapy is also difficult to cure, and recovery may take 18 months to five years or longer.
Diabetes. This is the most common cause. Among people with diabetes, more than halfwill develop some type of neuropathy.
A 2017 paper suggests that some anticonvulsants are among the most effective medications for neuropathic pain. These first-line neuropathy medications act on specific ion channels that traffic calcium ions. They include gabapentin (Neurontin) and pregabalin (Lyrica).
Intraneural Facilitation (INF) treatment effectively restores blood flow to damaged nerves, decreasing pain caused by diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN), according to a new study conducted by researchers at Loma Linda University Health.