--that doctor is asinine, having no understanding of the myriad symptoms that can attend peripheral neuropathy, especially if it involves the smaller, unmyelinated fibers that subsume the sensations of pain and temperature.

Diabetic neuropathy, in particular, through dysregulation of the nitric oxide pathways, often preferentially attacks the smaller fibers. Certainly numbness can be one result, but so can burning, stinging, lancing pain; electric shock feelings; sensations of something on the skin when nothing is there, pain out of proportion to offending stimuli (allodynia), and a whole set of parastheses ("beyond normal feelings").

A has been mentioned, numbness often represents a complete dying of the nerves, whereas pain often indicates damaged nerves that have not (yet) completely stopped transmitting signals, but are garbling and misinterpreting them. (Healing nerves that are regrowing and fighting through tissue can also often be painful for a while, until the brain learns to reinterpret the signals.)

Have the doctor take a look at these:

http://www.ccjm.org/content/76/5/297.full

http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org...56/8/2148.full

There's plenty more, especially if you Google up the name Aaron Vinik, who is one of the world's leading researchers in the field of diabetic neuropathy.