“Hi, this is Dr. Silvester and I’m going to talk to you today about one of the supplements that we use for our patients that have neuropathy. Neuropathy can be caused by a lot of different things. The most common, in our office, is diabetes, but there are other things that can cause neuropathy like thyroid dysfunction, cancer treatments, chemotherapy can cause neuropathy. Then there’s a large group of patients that have no discernible cause of neuropathy. There’s probably a hundred different things that can cause neuropathy. Basically, supplementation can be helpful in those things.

There are a lot of prescription drugs for neuropathy, and we use them quite frequently, but they’re only good for pain relief. The really don’t seem to have any effect on helping the nerve get better. The more frequent theory, or current theory, of why nerves suffer is because of a thing called mitochondria dropout. That’s a little scientific, but mitochondria are little energy packs inside of the cell, and they make the energy that the cell uses to heal itself and to maintain an electronic gradient, which a nerve has to do in order to conduct impulses. When you get these little mitochondria that live inside your cell, when they start to die because of oxidated stress or damage to them, then the nerve starts to suffer.

The first one I’m going to talk about is called Benfotiamine. Benfotiamine is a derivative or form of vitamin B-1, but it’s much more bio-available and more effective. Benfotiamine can be used as a supplement, and in most studies that have been done, about 70% of patients, when they start taking Benfotiamine, they have significant improvement in their symptoms.

We use Benfotiamine almost routinely on our patients whey they come in with neuropathy. We suggest they start taking that supplement. There’s different places you can get that. We sell it here at our office, we also tell our patients places on the Internet where they can get it. Studies have been done using a dosage of anywhere up to 600 mg. We start out at about 320 mg per day and we’ve noticed that’s usually enough. That usually does pretty well for helping our patients get rid of a lot of their symptoms. How it works – it helps the body’s ability to make more energy. It helps those little mitochondria repair themselves to some degree but more importantly, it helps generate more energy for the cell so that the cell can actually heal it’s cell wall and maintain the electrical gradient inside the nerve and so Benfotiamine has been a big tool for us.”