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Diabetic Neuropathy: Understand What Your Doctor Means


By Jenny H Jordan

Diabetic neuropathy, or the pathology of diabetic neuropathy, can appear mysterious and complicated to understand, for anyone who's first introduced to these terms. They are particularly difficult to understand for someone with a small amount of previous knowledge of the nervous system. You may be presenting to your doctor with a symptom like a certain pain, or loss of feeling in your feet, and instantly, your health care provider knows these as diabetic neuropathy symptoms. Most likely, you'll be confronted with some medical terms that you have never heard of previously. It seems that no matter how old we are, men and alike need to understand why we have a certain symptom, and the best way to treat it.

For example, maybe you have scheduled a physician visit due to pain, and your doctor instantly recognizes this as neuropathic pain, and starts to explain neuropathy affects which are related to diabetes. Additionally, in place of hearing about your levels of blood sugars, this talk has grown to talking about levels of sorbitol. It may be overwhelming for a patient to hear a barrage of new terms all at 1 time, or going from 1 subject to the other, such as flitting from discussing blood, to talking about a nerve. When doctors bring in new words to patients, such as nitric oxide and, it's not unheard of for a patient to leave the office with more questions than they went in with.

Diabetic neuropathy is actually divided into four groups: Peripheral neuropathy which affects the arms, hands, legs, feet, & toes; autonomic neuropathy affects the blood vessels & heart, the digestive system, urinary tract, sex organs, eyes, sweat glands & lungs; proximal neuropathy affects the hips, buttocks legs and thighs; & focal neuropathy which affects the lower back & pelvis, abdomen, chest, thighs, legs, feet, eyes, ears & facial muscles.

As you can see, diabetic neuropathy can affect the nerves throughout the body. Because of this, there can be several different kinds of symptoms. Because pain, numbness, sensitivity to temperatures, sweating, etc. are very noticeable symptoms of neuropathy from diabetes, there are several other more hard to determine signs that you can miss. This is why it's very important to inform your doctor of any physical changes you may notice.

Neuropathy may manifest in such a variety of ways that symptoms like high blood pressure, constipation, sexual dysfunction, blurry eyesight, heavy perspiration and so on, need to be assessed by a professional before they evidence themselves as, or are attributed to, diabetic neuropathy. In order to properly diagnose you, your physician can order specialized tests i.e. nerve conduction studies to see how well your nerves are transmitting and how the muscles surrounding them respond, use ultrasound to look at various organs, and they may check for a variance in your heart beat.

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