Drug Induced Small Fiber Neuropathy

Is drug induced SFN TMS? I ask this because I understand drug induced SFN can be caused by physical nerve damage. I’m just curious as I’ve been reading up about this recently. What’s the consensus?

 

Mike stop reading up about stuff! It’s just going to make you stuck. SNF is TMS. You are afraid of going on and off of medication—that’s what triggered it. Your fear. Not the medication. The way to get better is to explore your emotions, not the physical. Float and let time pass. Your nerves need to heal. A trick of the TMS mind is to always doubt the diagnosis. It keeps you from doing the work.

 

Thanks, Diana. I don’t actually think o have SFN. I know I have central sensitisation (TMS) due to severe stress and fear. However, I was reading about pain on this site (sfn) and the term came up. Was curious about it as I never heard much about it before and I got triggered. It just made me think, you know. Bless you and thanks.

 

Hear you on that one! Hope you are feeling a little better. Are you doing OK?

 

I'm surviving and taking each day as it comes. Thank you for asking, sister -

 

I’m glad you’re hanging in there!

 

Question I'm pondering ... The Mayoclinic says that the brain can be maladaptive and it cannot return to its previous form because the brain has structurally created these new traffic systems. This is why CSS (their terminology for TMS) cannot be cured with medication or procedures. So the mainstream (mayoclinic) says TMS cannot be cured but Dan/Sarno/Schubiner etc says the brain is neuroplastic and the brain can go back to non pain pathways. I've accepted I got TMS (took me months to get to this conclusion) but having the belief that the pain pathways can be reverted is another challenge. AI and other web sources all say that CSS/TMS is not curable. Sure there are anecdotal reports on this site and other sites of people who have significantly reduced their TMS pain but that isn't scientific. If this is the case then why do the mainstream say that it cannot be cured?

 

Well, first I’ll say I wish I had a dollar for everyone on this forum who’s been to Mayo Clinic—and they found nothing, later to be cured of TMS.

Just because the medical world doesn’t currently believe (much) in mind-body-derived illness and has no scientific cures for it doesn’t make that true. Medicine is evolving year by year. They just haven’t caught up with what we TMSers know yet.

We also once thought the earth was flat.

Healing from TMS involves trusting your own logic and your own gut knowledge of yourself to believe the mind-body mechanism is at play.

As far as Mayo not believing in neuroplasticity… it’s being proven currently on all sorts of credible scientific fronts, so sooner or later, Mayo will catch up.

You know, I think you might like to explore the medical world’s TMS organization—comprised of leading doctors who believe in TMS. It’s called the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms (ATNS) https://www.symptomatic.me/

But I will caution you: maintaining doubt is a way to Avoid Doing The Work. Remember always that your TMS brain wants to distract you from your psychological issues. Why? Because it’s afraid you’ll die of emotional pain to look under those rocks. But you won’t die. Ignoring them is actually what’s killing you.

 

I do think you are correct that the mainstream are wrong as I know of people who had fibromyalgia who were later in remission. I wouldn’t say cured but their symptoms became very manageable. However, I don’t think all central sensitisation symptoms are due to deep rooted psychological causes. Some people could go through a very stressful period eg a severe infection, death of a loved one, car accident etc and the nervous system (mind) goes on high alert creating TMS pains. For some people psychological work isn’t the answer and just finding a way to communicate to the mind that all is safe NOW is all that’s required. Anyways, I’m due to start taking LDN tomorrow and I hope that overtime that will help make life more tolerable. Take care, sister. You’ve helped me more than you’ll ever know.

 

I agree —you’re right about that!

I’m so glad to hear it! Good luck with the LDN — I hope it really helps you!

 

That is not a correct statement regarding the Mayo Clinic. It is true that TMS--aka CSS (Central Sensitization Syndrome)--cannot be cured by medication or medical procedures like surgery and injections. But the Mayo Clinic goes on to say this: "However, by applying an interdisciplinary approach to rehabilitation, we can leverage the mechanisms that enable our nervous system to learn and adapt to also manage CSS.”

The strictest standard of proof in healthcare is the randomized controlled trial. A randomized trial of Alan Gordon’s Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) to treat TMS was conducted several years ago. Everyone in the study had chronic back pain. The average period of pain was 8.9 years, and on a pain scale of 1 to 10 the mean score was 4.1. The patients in the study were divided into three groups: PRT, placebo treatment, and conventional medical treatment. The study lasted four weeks. Every patient in the PRT group had an individual therapy session with a PRT therapist twice a week. At the end of four weeks, 66% of the PRT patients were pain free or nearly pain free, which was defined as a score of 0 or 1 on a pain scale of 1 t0 10. In contrast, only 20% of the placebo patients were pain free or nearly pain free, and for the conventional treatment patients the number was only 10%. A key component of the study was functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain circuit activity. That was done over the course of the study so it could be ascertained whether brain circuit activity changed with treatment. It showed that PRT reduced the brain circuit activity involved in central sensitization.

 

... and @mikeinlondon this is a PRT workbook that I recently discovered, published at the end of last year, that you could perhaps consider doing if you're interested in trying PRT https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pain-Reprocessing-Therapy-Workbook-Neuroplasticity-ebook/dp/B0CTQLMDHS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=33QLMTCZW4VAO&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.w51xtfVNo8-ipedrtMFAdiQiZGY6CXV_PcKTyDHFTI2lEoDjGaA4IPiIj9OcdU2n97Xm9yTEFmZ7-hnsRXsqqooeHRqd_ojhmyrucV7g8apryD9faYcvLMq089m-1ptP5rFGdY948rVzMq9pxM3B6BjOYVe_LnM3qK-OLegIFnTm5geEC4BEqvYLHIV0lg87.RS8VsSOQhxcHlUmFo9BESB0m0Uz_rE9QBU8nVsPWnno&dib_tag=se&keywords=pain+reprocessing+therapy+workbook&qid=1754782867&sprefix=pain+rep,aps,101&sr=8-1

You can see more of a preview of this workbook on Google Books than you can on amazon here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qMfxEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook)

 

Agreed with diana.....i used to research stuff online, all it did was raise my anxiety level.