"How I cured my neuropathy in feet": I read 40 of those stories with my neighbor at his kitchen table, and the real ones all had one thing in common

"How I cured my neuropathy in feet." That is what my neighbor Gene typed into his phone, word for word, almost every night last winter. He would lie awake around two with his feet burning under the sheet, and he would read whatever came up until the sky went gray. In February he printed the ones he'd saved at the library, forty-one pages of strangers saying they'd beaten the thing that was keeping him up, and carried them across the street to my kitchen table in a grocery bag.

"You were a bookkeeper," he said. "Tell me which of these people are lying."

Gene is 68. He drove a truck for thirty-four years, mostly the long route from Memphis up through St. Louis, and he says he lost the feeling in his toes "somewhere around Illinois, I just didn't notice which year." First it was cold feet in summer. Then pins and needles when he lay down. Then a burning on the soles that started like a sunburn every evening and by midnight felt, in his words, like standing on a grill grate in socks.

The first pile: the ones that chased the burning

We spent two evenings on that stack with a pot of coffee and two pens. And the first thing I noticed, the way you notice a pattern in a ledger, was that most of the stories were really about the same thing. Something cooled the burning down.

Soak your feet in apple cider vinegar. Rub on a cream with menthol or pepper in it. Ice packs in a towel. A magnetic insole. A TENS machine from the drugstore. A cream with a numbing agent. One man swore by sleeping with his feet in a cooler. And I want to be fair to every one of them, because a lot of those things really do help somebody get through a night. Gene tried half of them himself. The vinegar soak gave him about twenty quiet minutes. The menthol cream gave him about forty and a bedroom that smelled like a hockey locker room.

But when we read closely, almost none of those writers said how they were doing a year later. And the few who did said the same thing Gene already knew: it comes back. It always comes back by bedtime. "These people didn't cure anything," Gene said. "They found a better ice cube."

The second pile: the ones that went after the wire

It was a small pile. Maybe six stories out of forty. They didn't agree on the remedy, either. A couple talked about getting a vitamin level checked that nobody had checked. One woman wrote about a morning recipe she'd learned of, something with turmeric in it, and was very particular that it had to be a certain kind and taken at a certain hour, and that the turmeric in the spice aisle wasn't the same thing. She never said why. Gene underlined that part twice.

What those six had in common wasn't the recipe. It was that every one of them had stopped asking how to make the burning quieter and started asking what was making it. Every one of them talked about the nerve itself.

What a nerve actually is (the way a trucker understood it)

Gene understood it faster than I did, because of his rig. The nerves that run down to your feet are long wires, and every wire is wrapped in a coating, the same way the cables on a trailer are wrapped so road salt can't get at the copper. The medical name for the coating is myelin. When it's whole, the signal goes through clean and you feel the floor and nothing else.

When the coating wears thin, the signal leaks. Some messages come through too weak, and that's the numbness. Some come through too loud, and that's the burning and the electric zaps. And the longest wires in your body are the ones that go to your toes, which is exactly why it starts there and climbs.

"So the ice is just cooling the bulb," Gene said, "while the cable's still bare." I couldn't have said it better.

Which leaves the question none of the forty stories answered, and none of his doctors had either: what wears the coating away, night after night, in a man who takes his pills and watches his sugar?

The doctor in the small pile

One of the six stories mentioned a doctor who had spent close to thirty years treating people with nerve trouble in their feet and had come to his own view about that question. As that woman told it, he believes there's a natural process around the nerve that, when it gets out of balance, eats at the coating slowly, the way rust eats at metal, and leaves a kind of buildup behind. He has his own name for it. Sugar speeds it up. Years speed it up. And in his view, that is why so many home remedies feel good for twenty minutes and change nothing: they never get anywhere near it.

I'm a retired bookkeeper, so let me be plain. That's one doctor's way of looking at it, not something every neurologist would sign. I can't explain his whole argument and I won't pretend to. What I can tell you is that it was the first thing in that grocery bag that explained what Gene was actually feeling.

And here is where the story stops being about paper.

Gene's daughter-in-law and the bottle on her counter

Gene's son married a woman named Renee who works the counter at a pharmacy in town, the kind of person who reads every insert that comes through. When Gene told her about the two piles at Sunday dinner, she went quiet and then went to her kitchen cabinet and came back with a bottle. Her own mother had been taking it for her feet since spring.

It was called NervoLyn. Gene doesn't trust anything that comes in a bottle, so he did what he does, which is put his reading glasses on and go through the label line by line, out loud, with Renee correcting his pronunciation.

• Alpha lipoic acid. The company calls it one of the most studied antioxidants for the nerves of the hands and feet, to help protect nerve tissue from everyday wear. "That's the rust," Gene said.
• Turmeric extract, standardized to 95% curcuminoids. For the body's normal inflammation response around stressed nerves. Gene looked at me. "Not the spice-aisle stuff, then." I told him that's about all I know about it.
• Butcher's broom. An old circulation herb, to keep blood moving all the way down to the feet. "Thirty-four years of sitting. Yeah."
• L-carnitine and Coenzyme Q10. Both about energy inside the cells, the fuel a nerve needs for its own repairs.
• Magnesium glycinate, 80 mg. A gentle form of magnesium the company ties to calm nerve signaling and better sleep.

"It's not an ice cube," he said when he got to the bottom. "It's somebody who went after the cable." He took the label to his own doctor, who read it, said it wouldn't fight with anything he was on, and told him to keep his checkups, which he does. It's one capsule a day. And the company offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, which, Gene pointed out, is a lot more than he got from the TENS machine.

What he noticed, month by month

Gene takes his with breakfast, standing up at the counter like he's still got a load to pick up. I get the report from the porch.

• Week 1. Nothing. "Same grill grate."
• Weeks 2 and 3. A new tingle in the balls of his feet that he didn't care for one bit. He nearly quit. Renee told him some people feel tingling come back into a numb area before more normal feeling does, and that nobody can promise you that's what it is. He kept going because, as he put it, "I already paid the toll."
• Month 1. The first night he slept past four without getting up to stand on the cold kitchen floor. He didn't notice until he saw the clock.
• Months 2 and 3. The burning still visits on long days, but later and shorter. He wears shoes to the hardware store again instead of the slippers with the backs stepped down.

Why so slow? Because nothing in it is a cover. If the coating has been wearing thin for years, the body patches it on its own schedule, and the longest wires get their signal back last. The company says most people notice early changes in about three to four weeks, with fuller results over eight to twelve weeks of daily use. That's why Gene, who never in his life drove a short route, went to the bigger supply after his first bottle.

Who it's for, and who it isn't

It may be worth a look if you're over 50, the burning, tingling or numbness started in your toes and has been creeping up, your doctor has checked the basics, and everything you've tried so far has only cooled things down for a while.

It is not for you if the numbness came on suddenly or on one side, comes with leg weakness, a drooping face or trouble speaking, or you have a sore on your foot that isn't healing. Those need a doctor today, not a blog. If nobody has ever checked your blood sugar, B12 and thyroid, start there. And if you're pregnant or nursing, or you take medicine for blood sugar, blood pressure, blood thinning or nerve pain, show your doctor the label before you begin.

Why a man who trusts nothing said yes

For Gene it was the arithmetic. Sixty days to find out, with his money back if his feet didn't notice. One order, nothing that renews on its own, made in the United States in a GMP-certified facility. He'd already spent more than that on creams, insoles and a machine that's now holding a door open in his garage. "Worst case," he said, "I lose a phone call."

So, did he cure it?

Gene would tell you to be suspicious of anybody who uses that word, and so would I. Results vary, and his are his. He still sees his doctor, still checks his feet every night with a hand mirror he bought for the purpose, and still doesn't drive past dark. But he threw out the grocery bag. "I don't need forty strangers anymore," he told me on the porch. "I needed to know where the bare wire was."

P.S. He kept one page from that stack, the one about the turmeric and the hour, folded in his wallet. He says it's "for the next fellow." If you're the next fellow, here's what Renee's mother had been taking since spring. And if your feet go quiet rather than hot, my sister's story about the drawer full of creams is the other half of this one.

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