Nerve Health Community

Prelander | Burning Feet | 7 Reasons (The Third Door)

My wife started taking gabapentin on the 6th of March 2025. 300mg, three times a day, with her breakfast, her lunch and her tea. She never missed one. She cut out sugar. She bought B12 tablets from Boots. She rubbed cream into her feet every night. She soaked them in cold water. She slept with her feet out from under the duvet in the middle of winter. She went to physio every Tuesday. Pauline did everything I would have told any customer to do. I know, because I spent thirty eight years behind the counter as a community pharmacist telling people to do exactly that. She fell on our landing at 3:40 in the morning on the 2nd of October. She was 64 years old. The lead for our springer spaniel, Biscuit, is still on the hook by the back door. I can't move it. Pauline hung it there the last time she managed to walk him round the block. That was in April. Her bed socks are still folded on her side of the bed. The box of tablets is still on the kitchen windowsill, eleven left in the strip. If I move them, she's really gone. I need to tell you what happened to Pauline. Because I keep seeing the same posts on Facebook that I would have answered with a box of tablets and a leaflet just a year ago. "My feet burn every night, GP wants to put me on gabapentin, has anyone found anything that actually helps?" And it makes me feel sick to my stomach. If you are over 50 and your feet burn, tingle or go numb at night, or someone you love's do, please read this entire thing. I know it's long. I know you're scrolling. I know you've got things to do. A year ago I would have given anything, everything, for someone to tell me what I'm about to tell you. Because here's the thing I understand now that I didn't understand then. Pauline thought she had two choices. Take the tablets and put up with what they do to you. Or refuse them and learn to live with it, the way the GP said she probably would have to. She never knew there was a third door. Nobody ever showed it to her. Including me. The pharmacist. Her husband of 41 years. The man who spent thirty eight years handing people exactly those two doors across a counter. Holding them open. Watching people walk through. Let me tell you how I found the third door. Too late for her. Not too late for you. Pauline went to the GP on the 6th of March 2025. She'd put it off for over a year. The burning started in her toes. Then the soles of her feet. Then it crept up to her ankles. Fine all day. Then she'd sit down in the evening, or get into bed, and her feet would start to burn like she was standing on a hot pavement in bare feet. She was still walking Biscuit twice a day. Still doing her Thursday morning swim. Still babysitting our grandson two afternoons a week. She thought it was just her age. Honestly, so did I. The GP did the tests. Bloods. Sugar. Thyroid. All of it came back "within range". "Pauline, this looks like peripheral neuropathy. We don't always find a cause. I'm going to start you on gabapentin. It should take the edge off the burning." "Is there anything I can do myself?" "Keep your sugar down. Keep moving. Try a cream if you like. But to be honest with you, a lot of people find they have to learn to live with it." She came home and sat at the kitchen table for a long time without saying anything. I know now what she was doing at that table. She was standing in front of two doors and deciding which one to walk through. Door one: take the tablets. Do everything they said. And she'd already heard from the ladies at the swimming pool what that road looked like. Feeling dopey. Putting on weight. June's husband, who "just sat in his chair all day" after they put him on his. Become a patient. Become someone managed. Door two: don't. Refuse them. Learn to live with it. And lie awake every night while it slowly crept further up her legs. That was the whole choice, as far as she knew. As far as anyone had ever told her. I want you to understand something. I sat across from her at that table and I told her to take the tablets. I told her the same thing I'd told thousands of people over thirty eight years. I believed it. Every word. I believed the tablets would give her her nights back. She picked door one. Because her GP said to. Because I said to. Because what else do you do. She collected the gabapentin from my old pharmacy on the high street that afternoon. The girl behind the counter was one I'd trained. Pauline took the first capsule with her tea that evening and put the box on the windowsill where she'd see it every day. Then she went upstairs and got out a pair of my old cotton socks, because someone on a forum said cotton helped with the burning. Two weeks in, a lady at the pool told her to try B12. Pauline bought a tub of B12 tablets from Boots that same afternoon. Then a capsaicin cream. Then a foot spa from Argos, which she filled with cold water every night at ten o'clock. For 211 days, she didn't miss a single capsule. She cut out the biscuits with her tea. She gave up the glass of wine on a Friday because someone said alcohol makes nerves worse. Not at our niece's wedding in June, where everyone was dancing and Pauline sat with her shoes off under the table. Not at our grandson's 5th birthday in August, where she watched the football in the garden from a chair. Not on our anniversary weekend in Whitby in September, where she sat in the car with her feet on the dashboard while I walked to the end of the pier on my own. I learnt to do things I'd never done in my life. Rubbing cream into her feet at midnight. Filling the foot spa. Fetching ice packs wrapped in tea towels at 2 AM. She stopped going to her Thursday swim because the changing room floor felt like walking on broken glass. I stopped going to my Wednesday bowls, because I couldn't stand the thought of her sitting at home on her own with her feet in a bowl of water. She lost the morning walks with Biscuit. Every day for nine years, the same loop round the playing fields. In April she came home after half of it, sat on the bottom stair and cried. Biscuit sat with his head on her knee. She never did the full loop again. She lost something she'd had her whole adult life. The simple pleasure of going to bed and just falling asleep. And she kept going anyway. Because the GP said to. Because I said to. She walked through door one all the way. As far as it would take her. Four weeks into the tablets, the fog came. She'd stop in the middle of a sentence and look at me. "What's the word? You know the word." She forgot our grandson's swimming lesson and went very quiet for the rest of the day. She started leaving notes on the fridge for herself because she didn't trust her own memory anymore. Her energy? Gone. The woman who used to be up and out with the dog by seven couldn't get going before ten. I'd find her asleep in the armchair at two in the afternoon. She called it "living in cotton wool". She put on almost a stone in four months. Her ankles swelled. She felt unsteady on her feet, and she'd grip the banister with both hands coming down the stairs in the morning, like she was ninety, not sixty four. And the burning? It was a little duller in the day. But every night, as soon as she lay down, it was still there. The GP said the side effects were common. Said her body would adjust. Said the benefits outweigh the downsides. The review was on the 23rd of September. "How's the burning, Pauline?" "About the same. Maybe a bit better in the day. The nights are still awful." She'd been on the tablets AND done everything else for six months and the nights had barely changed. The GP said, "Some people don't respond well to gabapentin. I'm going to switch you to pregabalin. It tends to be stronger. If that doesn't do it, we can think about adding amitriptyline at night. Keep doing what you're doing." Pauline came home and sat at the same kitchen table. The same one. She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said: "I've done everything, Graham. The tablets. The cream. The sugar. The socks. I can't think straight, I can't walk the dog, and my feet still burn every single night." I told her to give it time. I told her to trust the process. I told her what I'd told thousands of people. She nodded. She started the pregabalin. It's the box that's still on the windowsill. Nine days later, nine days, she got up at 3:40 in the morning to run her feet under the cold tap in the bathroom. She'd done it a hundred times. She couldn't feel the edge of the top step. She was dizzy from the new tablets. I heard her go down from our bedroom. I knew what it was before I reached the landing. Thirty eight years, you know the sound of a fall. You hear it in the shop. You hear it on the pavement outside. She was at the bottom of the stairs with her leg twisted underneath her. She looked up at me and said, "I'm sorry. I couldn't feel the step." Not panicked. Quiet. Like she was apologising for spilling the milk. The ambulance took forty seven minutes. I sat on the hall floor holding her hand with a blanket over her. Biscuit lay against her side the entire time and wouldn't move. I rang our daughter at 4:10 and couldn't get the words out. I just kept saying "it's your mum, it's your mum." The young doctor in A&E looked at the X ray and his face did this thing. I've seen that face. I've made that face, handing over a prescription I knew wasn't good news. I never knew what it felt like from this side. "Mr Whitfield, your wife has fractured the neck of her femur. She'll need surgery. With her balance and the sensation in her feet, recovery is going to be a long road." "But she's been doing everything," I said. I heard the words come out of my mouth and I recognised them. I'd heard them a thousand times across the counter. Wives. Husbands. Daughters. "But he's been taking them every day." "But she's done everything they said." He looked at me. "I know. I'm sorry." They operated the next morning. She was on the ward for five weeks. I learnt things about hospitals I thought I already knew. The leaflet version is clean. The real version is your wife looking at you on day four and asking where Biscuit is, and whether someone has walked him. Then asking again ten minutes later. The confusion that comes after an operation like that, at that age, takes a person away from themselves piece by piece, and there is nothing in thirty eight years of pharmacy that prepares you for watching it happen to the woman you love. She never stood up on her own again. In week three a chest infection set in. In week four they moved her to a side room. The consultant told me that her nerves had probably been running short for years. That the burning, the numbness, the balance, none of it had come out of nowhere. He said it like he was reading the weather. I wanted to grab him and say, "I know. I spent thirty eight years saying the same things in the same tone." On the 19th of November, at 4:52 in the morning, the nurse rang me and told me to come in. By the time I got there, she'd gone. I drove home at 7 AM. Her walking boots were by the back door. Biscuit's lead on the hook. Her reading glasses folded on the bedside table, still on the page she'd been reading. Her bed socks folded on her pillow. The box of pregabalin on the windowsill. Eleven left in the strip. Where it sits today. I sat in her chair in the kitchen and didn't move for most of the day. Biscuit sat by the back door, waiting for her. The house was so quiet I could hear the fridge hum. 41 years, and now the only sound in my house was the fridge. The funeral was on the 3rd of December. Our grandson tugged my sleeve and whispered, "Grandad, who's going to walk Biscuit with Nanny now?" I had to leave the room. After the funeral I tried to go back to normal. I couldn't. Because every time I opened my phone I saw women Pauline's age, men my age, posting "Feet on fire every night, GP says gabapentin or learn to live with it, anyone tried anything natural?" or "Numb toes and pins and needles, they say it's just my age." And I knew, I KNEW, some of them were standing at the same two doors Pauline stood at. The same two doors I handed across the counter for thirty eight years. Take the tablets and become someone managed. Or refuse and learn to live with it. Neither of those doors feeds the nerve. That's what nobody tells you. And I was the one who spent his career not telling them. I couldn't just sit there and watch people walk through the doors I'd been handing out. So I started reading. Not the way I read as a pharmacist, skimming the leaflet for the dose and the side effects. The way a widower reads. With the kind of desperation that strips away every assumption you've built your working life on. I read for weeks. Papers I'd have skipped five years ago. The physiology I'd learnt at university and hadn't truly thought about in decades. And one thing kept coming up, over and over, that I'd spent thirty eight years looking straight past. Do you know what a nerve actually looks like? It's not a bare wire. It's alive. Every nerve running down to your feet is wrapped in a protective coating, like the insulation around an electrical cable. And that coating, and the nerve inside it, needs feeding every single day. Your body does it quietly, in the background, a thousand times a day, and you never think about it. To do that job, your nerves don't use one vitamin. They use several B vitamins, and each one has a different job. B12 contributes to the normal function of the nervous system. B1 helps nerve cells turn food into energy. B6 helps with the signals. Folate works hand in hand with B12. Take one away, and the others can't do their job properly. And here's the part that made me put my head in my hands at 2 AM at the kitchen table. As we get older, we absorb less of these vitamins from our food. And some of the most common tablets in this country make it even harder. Pauline had been on omeprazole for her reflux for twelve years. Metformin, which millions take for their sugar, does the same thing. It's in the leaflet. I'd read that leaflet a thousand times. I'd handed Pauline that box every month for twelve years. I already knew it. I'd known it since university. But I'd never, not once in thirty eight years, connected it to the burning feet people described to me across the counter. The tablets she took every day were never designed to feed the nerve. Gabapentin and pregabalin work by quietening the nerve signal, turning the volume down on what the nerve is shouting about. That's what they're for, and for some people that matters. But they don't give the nerve anything. They don't feed the coating. The nerve is left exactly as hungry as it was before. And the price of turning the volume down? That's the fog, the weight, the dizziness, the "cotton wool". They call those side effects. They're the tablets doing exactly what they're built to do, dulling the signal, while nobody looks at what the nerve itself might be missing. Pauline walked through door one. The quietening door. It dulled her, and nobody ever asked what her nerves were missing. Door two, learning to live with it, does nothing at all. There was a third door. A door where you don't only quieten the signal, you give the nerve what it uses to do its job. Every day. Alongside whatever your doctor has you on. Pauline never knew that door existed. I never showed it to her. I never showed it to anyone. Read that again, because it's the whole thing. I'm not going to tell you a bottle of vitamins would have stopped her falling down those stairs. I'll never know that, and I won't pretend to. What I know is that for 211 days she was offered two doors, and neither of them ever asked what her nerves were missing. I sat with that for four days. Then I did something I would have rolled my eyes at five years ago. I went to Boots and bought a tub of B12 tablets. My own feet had started tingling in the evenings. I'm 67 and I was frightened. The pharmacist buying vitamins off the shelf. If my old colleagues could have seen me. I took them for three weeks. Nothing. Not a thing. Then I ordered the B complex on Amazon with thousands of five star reviews and "high strength" on the label. Took those for another month. Nothing. I was furious. I'd finally found the third door and it was as empty as the other two. Then I went back to the actual research, not the marketing, and I stopped being angry at the vitamins and got angry at what they put in the tub. Most B12 tablets on the shelf use cyanocobalamin. It's cheap and it's stable on a shelf, which is why it's everywhere. Your body has to convert it before it can use it, and the older you are, the worse you tend to be at that. The form your body actually uses is called methylcobalamin. Active B12. Almost none of the cheap tubs use it. And B12 on its own is one piece of a puzzle. Remember: your nerves use several B vitamins together, each with its own job. Giving them B12 alone is like sending a builder to a job with a hammer and nothing else. Then there's how you take it. A hard tablet that has to get through your stomach. And if you're on omeprazole or metformin like millions of people are, that's exactly the route that already isn't working well for you. And the B complex I'd bought? I looked at the label properly. It had a big dose of B6 in it. Too much B6 over a long time can actually upset your nerves. Every pharmacist knows that. Nobody buying vitamins on Amazon does. I'd been doing the right thing in the wrong form. Worse than the wrong form. The form that was never going to reach. And here's the part that made me sit up straight. I started emailing the companies. I asked every one of them the same two simple questions. Which form of B12 is in your product? And exactly how much B6? Most of them never wrote back. A few wrote back with "proprietary formula" and nothing else. One told me it was "high quality". That was the whole answer. Not one label I picked up gave me what I wanted to know straight away. The form. The dose. Every vitamin, in black and white. About a week later I was reading a neuropathy support forum. People whose feet burn every night. People on gabapentin, pregabalin, amitriptyline. "Feel like a zombie" people. "Doctor says learn to live with it" people. Standing at the same two doors. A woman posted something that stopped me cold. Her mother had been on gabapentin at 68 for two years. The burning in the day was a bit duller, but she was so foggy she'd stopped driving, she couldn't walk to the end of the road, and the GP wanted to put the dose up. Sound familiar? She said she'd finally found a B vitamin drop that wasn't the chemist kind. Five B vitamins together, not just B12. Active methylcobalamin, the form your body actually uses. A liquid you hold under your tongue for 30 seconds, so there's no tablet to swallow. And every dose printed on the label, B6 included, so her mum could take the bottle to her GP and show him exactly what was in it. She added it to her mother's routine, alongside what the GP had her on. One dropper in the morning. It tastes of raspberry. By the third week her mum told her the evenings felt calmer. By the sixth week she was falling asleep without thinking about her feet. In week nine she walked to the post box and back for the first time in a year. She sent her daughter a photo of it. I read that post six times. So I started looking into what she'd found. And what I learnt is that there are five things a nerve support supplement has to do at the same time, or it's just another tub in the cupboard: One. It has to give your nerves several B vitamins together. Not B12 on its own. B12, B1, B6, folate and B3, because they each do a different job and they work as a team. Most tubs give you one and hope you don't ask about the rest. Two. It has to use active methylcobalamin. Not cyanocobalamin, the cheap form your body has to convert first. If the label doesn't say methylcobalamin, it isn't. Three. It has to skip the tablet. A liquid taken under the tongue, once a day, means no extra pill for people who already take a handful, nothing hard on the stomach, and a habit you'll actually keep. Four. It has to show you every dose on the label. Including the B6. Not "proprietary blend". Not "high strength". Every vitamin, every amount, in black and white, so you can show your own doctor. If the number isn't on the label, there's a reason they're hiding it. Five. It has to be independently tested and made properly. Made in a GMP certified facility. Third party lab tested. Not "trust us". A real lab with no reason to lie. Five things. All five. At the same time. In one bottle. I went back through every tub I'd bought. Not one did all five. Most did one. Every one was the same cheap B12 or the same overloaded B complex, sold with "high strength" where the actual information should have been. So I messaged the woman. She sent me the name. That's when I found Stedman. It was the only one I could find that hit all five. The 5 in 1 Nerve Protection Complex. Five B vitamins in one drop: active methylcobalamin B12 at 5,000 mcg, plus B1, B3, B6 and folate. A liquid you hold under your tongue for 30 seconds. Every dose printed on the label. Made in the UK in a GMP certified facility. Third party lab tested. Vegan Society approved. One dropper a day, 1.5 ml, raspberry flavour. No tablet. No stomach upset. That's the whole routine. After emailing a dozen companies that either ignored me or couldn't tell me what was in their own product, I sat there looking at a company that printed every number on the bottle. And a 90 day money back guarantee. Not 30 days. Ninety. Which I'll come back to, because in thirty eight years I never once saw a box of tablets come with your money back if it didn't help. I almost didn't order it. After the Boots tablets. After the Amazon tub. After thirty eight years of believing the only answer came in a box with a prescription label on it. After Pauline. But I had a sister in Norwich whose feet had started burning at night. Her GP had just offered her amitriptyline. I had a daughter on metformin since her second pregnancy, with pins and needles in her hands. I had my own feet. I ordered it. My sister Jean is 70. She'd had the burning for about a year. Worst in bed, like Pauline. Her GP offered her amitriptyline "to help her sleep through it". She'd watched what the tablets did to Pauline. She told me she wasn't ready to walk through that door yet. She and her GP agreed to look at it again in three months. I sent her the Stedman. I didn't ask. I just posted it, with a note that said, "If you don't take this every morning, I will drive to Norwich and stand over you, Jean. I mean it." She took it. She didn't change anything else, she's stubborn the way Pauline was stubborn. One dropper under her tongue every morning with her first cup of tea. Week two, nothing much. She rang me to say so, of course. Week four, she rang to say she'd gone to bed and fallen asleep before she'd even thought about her feet. She couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Week eight, she rang me from the beach at Cromer. She'd walked from the car park to the pier. She was crying. My sister. 70 years old, crying down the phone like a little girl. She said, "Graham, I think Pauline just needed someone to show her this door." I had to hang up. Then there's my daughter Claire. 41, two children, on metformin, pins and needles in her fingers every evening. Her GP said "we'll keep an eye on it". She started seven weeks ago. She says the evenings are quieter now, and she's stopped shaking her hands out while she reads the children their bedtime story. My old colleague Dennis. Thirty years a pharmacist like me. His feet had been tingling since his knee operation. He laughed at me when I told him. Then he read the label, the whole thing, every dose, the way only a pharmacist reads a label. He went quiet. Then he ordered three bottles. A month later he told me he'd stopped dreading the moment he got into bed. I'm a 67 year old retired pharmacist sitting in my late wife's chair at 2 in the morning because I can't sleep, and I can't stop thinking about my sister Jean. 70, stubborn, who was about to walk through the same door that took Pauline's last good months away. Here's what I know because I lived it, on both sides of the counter: The tablets quietened the signal. They never fed the nerve. And the quietening, the fog, the weight, the dizziness, took her life away a little more every week while the nights stayed the same. Cutting sugar was sensible. It didn't give her nerves what they were missing. The creams, the socks, the cold water and the ice packs sat on the surface. The burning was coming from inside. Most B vitamin tubs are the wrong form, the wrong dose, or only one piece of the puzzle. The thing her nerves needed never reached them. Pauline gave up everything she loved for 211 days and it didn't give her one good night back, because she only ever knew about two doors. I spent thirty eight years handing those doors across the counter. I handed them to my own wife. And I watched her walk through. I wish someone had shown us the third door before the 6th of March 2025. Before the cold foot spa at ten o'clock. Before 3:40 in the morning on the 2nd of October. I can't go back. Pauline can't come back. Biscuit's lead is on the hook by the back door and it's going to stay there. But you can still go forward. Here's where I got it: https://trystedman.com/pages/7-reasons-burning-feet I want you to go and order it. Not for me. For whoever would sit on the bottom stair with you if you couldn't make it round the block. Pauline used to say: You can't change yesterday. But you can stop letting it run your tomorrow. You can start giving your nerves what they've been missing tonight. Graham Whitfield, age 67 Retired Community Pharmacist Stamford, Lincolnshire P.S. Biscuit's lead is still on the hook by the back door. Every morning at seven he goes and sits under it, and for one second I forget. For one second I think she's about to come downstairs, put her boots on and take him round the playing fields like she did for nine years. She's not. Five weeks on a ward. 211 days of doing everything she was told. And a bottle with every B vitamin her nerves use, in a drop under the tongue, that I'd never once thought to look for in thirty eight years behind the counter. Please. Don't end up on the bottom stair. Don't let someone you love end up there. https://trystedman.com/pages/7-reasons-burning-feet P.P.S. I'm writing this at 2:14 AM because I can't sleep, Pauline's side of the bed is cold, and every time the phone rings I think it's Jean's neighbour ringing to tell me she's had a fall. Share this with anyone you love whose feet burn, tingle or go numb at night. Even a little. Even if their GP says "it's just your age". Even if they're already on gabapentin. Please. P.P.P.S. If your husband or your mum is already on nerve tablets and they "take the edge off", please don't close this page. Pauline's tablets took the edge off too. The nights never changed, because nobody ever looked at what her nerves were missing. Stedman isn't a replacement for anything your doctor has prescribed. It's not a drug. It's the B vitamins your nerves use every day, and it can sit alongside what you already take. Take the bottle to your GP and show them the label if you like. That's exactly why every dose is on it. You haven't missed the window. The window opens the day you start. https://trystedman.com/pages/7-reasons-burning-feet P.P.P.P.S. If you're reading this thinking "she'd never go for it", hear me. I didn't argue with Jean. I posted it to her with a note saying I'd drive to Norwich and stand over her, and she took it because she loves me. She didn't believe a word of it on day one. She believed it in week eight, on the beach at Cromer. You don't have to win the argument. You just have to put the bottle in their hand. P.P.P.P.P.S. One last thing, because I know what it is to be afraid to hope again. There's a 90 day money back guarantee. Ninety days. Think about that. In thirty eight years I never handed anyone a box of tablets that came with their money back if it didn't help. Nerves don't change overnight, so give it the full 90 days. And right now, if you buy 2 bottles you get a third one free, which is exactly the three months it needs. That's all I'm asking. One proper go. Don't let another month of burning nights go by without it in the house. https://trystedman.com/pages/7-reasons-burning-feet P.P.P.P.P.P.S. One more thing. It's not on the shelf at Boots or Holland and Barrett. The Amazon tubs are exactly the cheap single B12 and overloaded B complex I threw in the bin, which is the whole problem. Stedman ships from its own website, and there are already lookalike bottles popping up with similar names. Order it from the link above or you're right back in the vitamin aisle with a tub that was never going to reach. https://trystedman.com/pages/7-reasons-burning-feet