First, don't do anything I suggest without researching it yourself and running it by, and with acknowledgment of, your own trusted doctor(s).

I read the entire thread, and got 3 impressions, most of which have already been expressed.

1. It sounds like it could be viral due to the changing symptoms and moving around. An oversimplified analogy would be a virus cold that begins in the sinuses with congestion/runny-nose, then moves down causing sore throat/laryngitis, and continues down into the chest where it lingers the longest with coughing & stuff in your lungs. Viruses can do really crazy things. Just out of curiosity, did this whole thing start during or just after your having a virus? Have you ever had Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis) even as a kid/teen?

2. I know your cervical MRI didn't show anything, but that area (c5-c7) is where a lot of my problems are, and some (the burning pain in the neck & between shoulder blades) are somewhat familiar. A lot of nerves branch out in that area (odd that c7 doesn't even show up on that dermatome chart) so I wouldn't be surprised if something there was missed, has changed (this has been going on for a couple/3 years now, right?), or just didn't show up at all for some reason.

3. I also have severe osteoarthritis and bone spurs throughout my spine, and again, the burning pain in the same regions (though I do not have the skin sensitivity). When I was in my mid 40s, they told me I had the spine of a man in his mid 90s.... whoopie. Do ant-inflammatories have any effect on your burning?

You had some questions about RLA. I know it seems logical that you should take half of the ALA dosage, but for some reason, the ratio works out just as well with 1/6. I started taking 100 mg./day (RLA) almost a year ago for the burning (feet) of PN. My results were not typical, but the burning stopped virtually completely within 48 hrs., and hasn't returned (unless I do something stupid to aggravate it). A few months ago, when I began taking the pregnenolone, I added the pantothenic acid (B5) and got further improvement in the PN pain. I'll take it.

Since you're low on pregnenolone (like I was) and that's the mother hormone of all the others, it might make sense for you to start there like I did, along with B5 to fuel the process of turning pregnenolone into whatever in-between steps your body needs, all the way up to the testosterone.

Read Dr. Tennant's (4) articles:
http://www.practicalpainmanagement.c...-pain-patients

http://www.practicalpainmanagement.c...tractable-pain

http://www.practicalpainmanagement.c...in-update-2010

http://www.prescription2000.com/Inte...ranscript.html

then go on to NIH, Mayo, and any others you can find (sorry I don't have URLs handy...)

As I mentioned early in this thread, most doctors aren't accepting the idea of adrenal fatigue/exhaustion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenal_fatigue
but since your cortisol levels look ok, I wouldn't even go there. You're somewhat low in pregnenolone and testosterone (though not critically so) run those by your doctor with the articles (if he'll read them or look into it) and see if s/he'll help guide you through trying this for a few months. You might need to see an endocrinologist, who may do some more/different testing with some different ideas.

There are articles that caution about taking pregnenolone, and they're right. I found the dosage recommended by Dr. Tennant too high for me, so I started much lower and titrated up. As it turns out, this is pretty easy to do because this stuff converts in only a matter of hours (and is gone quickly too). Also, the articles I saw that cautioned against it were talking about people with normal levels taking it for "fountain of youth" purposes - not people who were deficient and supplementing/replacing very low levels. Big difference.

Doctors usually want about 3 months between tests for a lot of bloodwork to see if (whatever) is working, and that should be about right here to. If it's going to help, you'll probably know within the first week or two (though things will taper off as your levels come up).

In your other thread you wrote:
These words could have been written by me or countless others I've met on my journey. I once dubbed the feeling as "guinea pig complex" - being bounced from specialist to specialist, test to test, treatment/therapy to treatment/therapy... you feel like nobody knows squat and you're just their latest lab rat (sometimes we are; that's how they learn). Then I looked it up online, and found out about a dozen other folks had all thought they came up with it too... There's some truth to it; there's more that doctors/medicine don't know than they do know, but they still know more now than ever before, so what else can we do?

I've found this enlightening too; maybe you've seen it in another post:
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Blogs/21266?

Google: stages of grief and read a few articles, cuz that's what we're all going through here. Life-changing events we never expected, would never want in a zillion years, but we're stuck with them. Bleah.

I'm a little at the stage you want to be in in the second paragraph; I was preaching/practicing "pay it forward" decades before that movie came out. But I still get depressed and scared for the same reasons as you. Doing what I can - whatever I can - is one of the ways I distract myself from the dark side, and deal/cope with it all.

HTH,

Doc