4 Warning Signs of Neuropathy in Your Feet

Maybe you feel a buzzing in your toe or there’s some unexplained pain zapping down into your lower leg. These small sensory signs may be pointing to a potentially larger problem in the form of peripheral neuropathy.

As with most health issues, recognizing a problem in its earliest stages is best and gives you plenty of time to take action and prevent much larger problems from developing.

With that in mind, double board-certified surgeon and wound doctor Dr. Thomas Rambacher, with help from our team here at Foot Ankle Leg Wound Care Orange County, outlines four warning signs that you might be developing peripheral neuropathy.

A brief word about peripheral neuropathy

Before we get into some early signs of peripheral neuropathy, we want to make sure that we’re all on the same page. At our practice, Dr. Rambacher and the team specialize in foot, ankle, and leg wounds that, more often than not, are complications from poor circulation and peripheral neuropathy.

Now, there are more than 100 different types of neuropathy, which is the medical term for nerve damage, and we’re going to focus on nerve damage in your lower limbs, since that’s our area of expertise.

When neuropathy develops in your lower limbs, it’s likely due to poor circulation to these extremities, which leads to nerve damage. Drilling a little deeper, peripheral neuropathy in the lower limbs is often associated with diabetes or circulatory issues like peripheral artery disease (PAD).

If you consider that more than 38 million Americans have diabetes and between 10-12 million Americans have PAD, you see that a large chunk of our population is at risk for peripheral neuropathy.

Signs that point toward neuropathy

Now let’s get into the heart of this discussion about the signs of peripheral neuropathy in your lower limbs, which can include:

1. Pain

When the nerve damage occurs in your sensory nerves, it can lead to unaccounted for pain. This pain doesn’t stem from injury, but the damage to your nerves, and has been described as:

• Burning
• Stabbing
• Shock-like

The pain often comes and goes and, again, occurs even though there’s nothing obvious on the outside that’s causing it.

2. Numbness and tingling

Thankfully, damaged nerves don’t always signal pain, sometimes they lead to numbness and tingling in your lower legs and feet. The hidden danger here is that you can injure your foot and not know it thanks to the growing numbness.

3. You can’t register temperature changes

Another result of peripheral neuropathy is the inability to sense temperature changes in the affected area. Whether hot or cold, you’re not feeling either extreme in temperature.

4. Loss of positional awareness

Your sensory nerves help your body to register where it is in space, which can help everything from mobility to balance. If you start to lose sensory nerves in your lower limbs due to peripheral neuropathy, you can become more clumsy and unbalanced as your limbs lose positional awareness.

The bottom line is that, if you’re feeling anything strange in your lower limbs for no obvious reason, it’s a good idea to seek help to determine whether it’s peripheral neuropathy. If so, there are steps that we can take to help you contain and slow the nerve damage.

For expert diagnosis and care of peripheral neuropathy in your lower legs, ankles, and feet, we invite you to call our office in Mission Viejo, California, at 949-832-6018 or request an appointment online today.