Similar symptoms here, burning, tingling, pain, and numbness that comes and goes. Some places more constant than others. I've been diagnosed with PN, but reading this thread made me wonder if that might be a misdiagnosis and I might really have MS... Then I remembered my skin punch biopsy -- small bits of skin taken from my hip and ankle, sent to some lab in New Jersey. They counted up the peripheral nerves and saw that I have significant peripheral nerve loss. If you haven't had that kind of test, I highly recommend finding a doctor who will discuss it with you. It seems like it's vital in terms of having a differential diagnosis.

There aren't many labs that do the test. Mine was through Therapath. In my case, they don't have a contract with my health insurance company, so the insurance paid only 60%, but someone at Therapath has been hounding them for months to cough up more money. I suppose if that's unsuccessful, I'll end up paying the 40%, which will be about $500. Odd to say that I'll be fine with paying it, I'm just so glad to have a better idea of what's going on.

This is my first post, so the system won't let me put a URL in the message, but if you go to their site ('therapath dot com') you can poke around and find abstracts of the research behind the test, examples of what they're looking at, and an order form your doctor can use to obtain the materials used for the biopsy procedure.

(The biopsy did sting at the ankle, apparently its a hard place to anesthetize, but it wasn't that bad.)