Also... the very basic tennants of pain.... involve stopping whatever is causing it.

Our nervous system's perceptive job is to signal that something is wrong. The fragile nerve endings are supposed to tell you that an injury is happening.

With much of PN, some injuries may be chemical and not visible to the naked eye.

Having an exterminator come to your building and spray a potent chemical to eradicate insects, may react with YOU and set off the warning system. Consuming certain drugs or foods, may do the same.

It is like a car alarm, may set off with a light touch to the car, by a dog or cat, or the wind, or a bird landing on it, and set off the alarm, when no human is stealing it in fact.

Our nerve endings are an alarm system, to say--- we do not like "this" (whatever "this" is).

Because the peripheral nervous system has to be sensitive to signal us to stop what is causing it to go off, there can be many triggers. Pain can come from an injury, accident, surgery and those are visibly apparent. We see and understand it. With chemical injuries, or infectious ones, we cannot see it happening with our eyes, and therefore only the pain can be the signal. And with the complexity that humans now live with, the environment is so complicated, that we have to figure out what is going on. You don't get training in school in how to read your own body. Often you don't get other training you might need too, like parenting a new baby, how to find a job, how to be a supportive spouse. If we are lucky our family network is positive and provides this "training". But having a condition like PN is a shot out of the blue, that we don't have training for and therefore don't know where to look to fix it.

Doctors have always suspected things they cannot see, as either mythical or psychological, so when you go to them, they have little empathy for helping. Doctors cannot see pain, unless there is trauma or swelling to indicate it. So they tend to minimize it, and think it is imaginary or evoked for a sympathetic response. Back in history, doctors did not know bacteria existed, and thought "bad air" caused malaria, or plague. In history some disease was at times looked at as a punishment from God. If you read any medical history books you'll see examples of the evolution of "medicine" and that attitudes are still taught to students in medical school. They are for now our "modern" attitudes, but say in 50 yrs we'll look back on today and roll our eyes, and say "I can't believe they did that back then"!

So the bottom line is that where medicine is still not well along in effectiveness, we as patients are left to fend for ourselves. With education, computers, books, and other skills, we can do some things ourselves. Learning how your body works, is a skill you can learn, to help yourself in many ways. But to expect a doctor to give a pill after making a pronouncement as to what the cause of a sneaky thing like PN is ...is just not here yet.
We think that taking a pill, like for headache, or antibiotic for an infection, is how PN is going to be treated. And it just isn't so.
IVIG and similar strong IV meds, remain the only treatment for certain types of PN which is not the common majority. For the rest of us, finding tricks to reduce pain, or to remove a chemical trigger, or help a metabolic chemical error like diabetes, is all we have.

Many neurologists don't really put forth effort for sensory PNs.
They figure if you can walk and talk normally, you are lucky.
They cannot feel YOUR discomfort or measure it, and therefore it is not real to THEM. It is very frustrating and really, it is the exception here and not the rule to have a doctor who will go that extra mile and really do a good job with PN. Some people do come here who have good doctors, but many find little relief from doctors at all.