--became the first drug of choice for treating peripheral neuropathy pain (and various other types of neural pain) over the last decade or so, but it's far from the only drug that's been tried or that some have found effective.

There's a list of these in the following thread:

http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/thread177-2.html

(This is from our Useful Websites section at the top of the board, and is abou the fourteenth post down, compiled by our own Mrs. D.)

I myself have been on Neurontin and the generic version Gabapentin for over five years now, though I take considerably less than when my neuropathy pain was at its height; I've gone from 2400mg/day to 400mg/day now (but I do weigh about 206 pounds, which I'm fairly sure is more than you do).

I did weight about 190 pounds when all this started, though. Among other side effects Neurontin typically has are weight gain and a certain amount of fluid bloating (edema). As an anti-epileptic, the drug shares the quality of many of these of increasing carb craving--though whether the weight gain is mostly attributable to that or to the lessened activity from this condition is debatable.

The other side effects you mention--dizziness, fatigue, lethargy--are also very common. The mechanism of Neurontin is not fully understtod, but it does tend to depress central and peripheral nervous system firing rates through action analogous to the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, and so helps to dissipate runaway or erroneous nerve firing from damaged nerves.

I, too, am curious as to what testing you may have had to determine your condition and what specific causes may have been found, if any--many of us here have had the experience of having to go through long testing/diagnostic processes, often with not very knowledgable physicians, to get some answers, if there were any to be found. With over 200 known causes of neuropathy, and probably nearly as many yet undetermined, this is a very mysterious condition to have, and one often needs to be under the care of people at a tertiary research center to have any progress made.