Susan’s Journey to Pain Relief and Improved Mobility

JORDAN PYSZ / iFoundMyDoctor.com
Susan’s neuropathy pain was so great that she had to give up her job as a nurse and was later placed on disability. She’s now walking regularly and even playing tennis and biking again following treatment at Renewed Life Wellness Center.

More than 50 years ago in western Iowa, Susan Brown set the record for most points in a game by a Lawton-Bronson High girls basketball player. Amazingly, her 56-point mark still stands. But even if someone breaks the school record one day, Susan is confident it won’t happen in the same eye-popping way in which she set it. “We were on the road for that game, and near the end, I lost a contact lens,” Susan remembers. “They actually stopped the game for a while, and everybody was out on the floor looking for this contact lens, but we never found it. So, for the rest of the game I wore my eyeglasses, which were those old cat’s eye frames that were so popular then. “So, here I am wearing these eyeglasses, and everyone on my team keeps passing me the ball. At first, I didn’t understand why. Then I found out that it was because I was getting near the record. Everyone knew it but me, and I wound up scoring about 20 of my 56 points that night wearing those glasses, which was kind of funny.” The game came during Susan’s senior year and was more or less her basketball swan song. Opportunities to play collegiately never materialized, but for years she remained active and athletic, taking up tennis and biking. That is until peripheral neuropathy forced her to abandon those activities as well as her nursing career. A condition that results when the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord become damaged, peripheral neuropathy can cause numbness, tingling and stiffness as well as weakness, burning and pain in the feet or hands. The condition can be triggered by an injury, regular exposure to statin drugs, chemotheraphy, diabetes, and genetics. Susan, 71, has no idea how the condition came to affect her, but for years it left her physically disabled. “It started in 2011, and for me it caused this horrible pain and burning in my toes and the bottoms of my feet,” Susan laments. “It started the second I got out of bed, and it felt like I was walking on hot rocks, like my feet were on fire. “It was even worse if I wore shoes, so when I was working, I was in terrible pain. When it got to the point where I couldn’t tolerate wearing shoes, I had to quit my job. About two years later, I was placed on disability.” Susan began searching for medical help for her neuropathy pain soon after it began. The only relief she could find, however, came from pain medications, which were first prescribed to her in 2018. By 2020, those meds had created a whole new problem. “For three years, I was on oxycodone, and each year, I would need at least one more to get me through the day because that’s how opiates work,” Susan relates. “At one point, I was taking four or five a day, and that’s when I decided I needed to get off those things. “So, I found a rehab clinic in Tampa, took an Uber to get there, and spent nine days in their program. The first day was the worst of my life, and when I left, I was afraid to go home because I knew I’d be dealing with that neuropathy pain again, which I did. “But one day not long after that, it was like a higher power came over me because, out of nowhere, I read about this program a doctor had for peripheral neuropathy. After reading that article I made an appointment with that doctor, who is Dr. Carle.”

JORDAN PYSZ / iFoundMyDoctor.com
Susan during one of her red-light therapy treatments at Renewed Life Wellness Center.

Stage Struck

Kenneth D. Carle, DC, is the founder of Renewed Life Wellness Center, which is committed to offering the best in chiropractic care, medical weight-loss solutions, regenerative medicine therapy and treatment for peripheral neuropathy, which has four stages, according to Dr. Carle. Patients in Stages 1, 2 and 3 suffer from various amounts of pain, numbness and burning. As those symptoms grow in severity, patients can lose their balance, which can lead to a loss of independence and the need for walking assistance with a cane, walker or motorized chair. “In Stage 4, patients are too far gone, and some cannot be treated,” Dr. Carle notes. “That’s the stage where people need to have toes amputated and are totally reliant on others to take care of them. Thankfully, Susan was not at that stage.” Through his thorough examination of Susan, Dr. Carle discovered that she had Stage 3 peripheral neuropathy in both feet. That was the bad news. The good news is that Dr. Carle has about a dozen tools that he uses to treat peripheral neuropathy and restore damaged nerves. The severity of each patient’s condition determines which tools he will incorporate, but one, the ReBuilder, is used almost universally. An FDA-approved device, the ReBuilder uses neuro-electrical therapy to repair and regenerate damaged nerves. Dr. Carle also treats neuropathy with red-light therapy, in which waves of infrared light stimulate new growth in damaged blood vessels. This improves the overall function of the blood vessels, which leads to greater blood and oxygen flow in the targeted area. The flow promotes healing, a decrease in pain and an increase in function. Those devices and another that Dr. Carle recommends called a vibration plate can all be used by the patient at home. In addition, Dr. Carle typically recommends a cocktail of nutritional supplements designed to further advance the healing of the damaged nerves. “One of the supplements is a capsule,” the doctor explains. “The other is a powder you mix with water. Both are vasodilators that increase the production of nitric oxide, which increases the diameter of the blood vessels and helps with blood flow. “And when combined with the other treatments, they work. One hundred percent of our patients experience some level of improvement in their symptoms. We rarely get 100 percent improvement in our patients, but most improve between 30 and 75 percent.”

Maintenance Treatments

Dr. Carle used all of the devices in his tool kit in treating Susan, who joined the practice’s neuropathy program a year ago. Since then, her pain and discomfort have slowly dissolved and allowed her to become more active. “Even before I finished the first three months of the program with Dr. Carle, I felt like the treatments were making my pain more tolerable,” Susan says. “In fact, I was so happy with the results, I agreed to the maintenance treatments for another year.” The maintenance program calls for Susan to visit Renewed Wellness Center twice a month for evaluation and treatment and for the continuation of treatment at home, where she goes through a daily ritual in which she uses the ReBuilder, vibration plate and red-light therapy. “I think I do a pretty good job of getting all three of those things done each day, and it’s paying off, because last spring I started playing a little tennis and started riding my bike again,” Susan reveals. “And in May, I went on a trip to the Smoky Mountains. “I was even walking the trails there. But then I injured my hip. It wasn’t neuropathy related. I just developed some bursitis, but it slowed me down a bit. But I’m walking more now than I was before, and that’s thanks to Dr. Carle’s neuropathy treatment. “I’m really happy with the treatment I’ve received from him. It’s made the pain and discomfort a lot more tolerable, that’s for sure. That’s why I signed up for another year of maintenance treatments. Because it’s working well for me, and I want to stay in good shape.”