Yeah these flare ups make it really hard to understand where things are. I am surprised that the nerves could have such an immediate reaction to ingesting something (alcohol, sugar, etc...) but reading through the posts it seems that may very well be the case.

I guess all my understanding on the matter had to do with insufficient signals and that I had reduced some of the signaling capacity/clarity by drinking over an extended period of time. And that explicitly the reduction had to do with chemically severing the fibers.

In my case I do not have much, if any, large fiber loss. My muscles appear relatively unaffected. They do seem visually smaller/atrophied, but that could be due to the weight loss (I dropped approximately 15-20 pounds). In any case the affected nerves appear to be the unmyelinated C-nerves which transmit feeling (e.g. pain, numbness, tingling). Not the myelinated fibers that tend to control muscle contraction and whose diminishment would show on a nerve conduction test (mine was "normal").