And part of what she's implying is that the causes of neuropathy--of which there are many--can be very hard to pin down.

It HAS become increasingly evident that impaired glucose tolerance/pre-diabetes/insulin resistance CAN be a cause of neuropathy in some people, and typically the symptoms involve the small fibers that subsume the sensations of pain and temperature. (EMG/nerve conduction studies only show gross abnormalities with larger, myelinated sensory and motor nerves--though it looks like you may have some involvement of these from some cause.) A lot of doctors don't know this, though.

Take a look at my post number 12 in this thread--lots of links to articles about pre-diabetic neuropathy:

http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...1828#post21828

And, as has been mentioned, you could have multiple etiologies for your symptoms--for example, glucose dysregulation combined with compression from somewhere in your lumbar spine, and the combined symptoms may be greater than the sum of their constituent parts. There is actually a name for this--"double crush phenomenon"--in which an already compromised nerve has a second cause of compromise added, often compressive, and the symptoms then seem to increase all out of proportion to the severity of the compression.

See:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3275922

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2365954/

There's even a medical textbook about it now:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Dou.../9780792378051