CBD for peripheral neuropathy | Funny about Money

A reader asks which of the various over-the-counter CBD nostrums available in some American states seem to work best against the depredations of peripheral neuropathy.

This has been my experience:

The only rub-on nostrums I’ve tried are things I’ve found at Sprouts.

Their CBD Oil seems to be the strongest (well…that I’ve found so far, anyway). But it’s messy — like smearing Mazola on your hands or legs. If you’re putting it on your feet, of course you can cover it with socks. I’ve put it on the palms of my hands, which tingle & sting like the dickens, but only right before I go to sleep … hoping not to accidentally rub it all over the sheets.

Sprouts has little jars of CBD balm and of CBD cream. The balm has the consistency of Vaseline. Again: messy…but it seems to be pretty effective. The cream is much like any hand cream or face cream. It also dulls the stinging/tingling/pain some, and it’s much less messy.

You can get a CBD lip balm at Sprouts. That stuff is very effective for the crazy-making tingling lips.

Also found something called “Hemp Travel Balm Plus CBD.” This comes as a rub-on stick very much like the lip balm, only the tube is wider and it’s clumsier to apply. I think this stuff is not as effective as the lip balm. But…nothing ventured…none of these products are gonna put you in the poor house.

Last time I was there I found a “lotion” that comes in a tube. It’s called Garden of Life CBD Intensive Recovery Lotion. Claims to have 800 mg CBD; and it’s THC-free (as I think all of these things are). It seems to work as a moisturizer and it also helps some with the tingling/stinging effect. I think it’s a little milder than CBD balm and cream in jars.

Another product altogether that seems to work on the crazy-making tingling/stinging/burning is extra-strength Benadryl cream. Since this does not contain the Magical Mystery Weed, you can find it in drugstores and grocery stores everywhere.

Of things you can swallow: so far the most effective pill I’ve tried is plain old aspirin.

You could combine an aspirin sparingly — maybe once a day — with an antihistamine pill. Because I’ve been trying to unclog the ears, I’ve been using Sudafed. Try this strategy sparingly — dunno about you, but some antihistamines have been known to knock me into the middle of next week. I wouldn’t try it for the first time before driving, and also be aware that some of the things can keep you awake half the night. But IMHO if you’re NOT tingling and stinging, “awake” is an improvement…

If you have legal head shops in your state, then it might be worth buying some CBD gummies. These are fundamentally CBD-laced gum drops. I’ve never seen them at Sprouts — here in Arizona they seem to be available only at head shops. A friend of mine put me onto them as a nostrum that helps you doze through the middle-aged sleeper’s 3 a.m. wake-up call. I have found these things help quite a lot that way. A-n-n-d…the other night I took a flying leap off the Quack’s Diving Board and tried one to see if it would work against the neuropathy. When the hands were having a tingling frenzy, I chewed up half of a gummy, to see what would happen…and I think it actually did help. But I’d also taken an aspirin an hour or so earlier, so it’s hard to know exactly what might have been going on there.

Bear in mind that I am not a doctor and this post does not constitute medical advice! If you have access to legalized pot products and decide to try them for your peripheral neuropathy, proceed with caution! Do not drive after using any CBD edible(!). Don’t combine them with any other drug — especially not alcohol. And don’t overdo it with any of this stuff.

So it’s been about a month since I decided, at a young doctor’s urging, to climb back on the wagon…and since then have managed to cling to the haystack. She speculated that the disturbing tingling in the hands and feet is a peripheral neuropathy occasioned either by a vitamin B12 deficiency or by alcohol abuse.

I personally do not think one or two glasses of wine, once a day, taken with a large meal consisting of meat, two vegetables, or a vegetable & a salad represents alcohol abuse. On the other hand, neither do I feel my world will end if I substitute iced tea or iced coffee for the swiggles. The doc’s definition of “too much,” it develops, is driven by shifting standards of acceptably safe amounts of alcohol consumption — revised downward. These official pronouncements tell us that women should drink no more than 4 ounces of wine a day. This is less than the standard presented as Received Truth when I was a young pup.

Well. Four ounces is one rather small glass — hardly more than a taste. It’s not worth opening the bottle and dirtying up a wine glass to pour less wine than will accompany a full meal. I’ve probably been drinking about 6 ounces a day. Apparently that is dire, DIRE, we tell you!

Okay, to the great joy, no doubt, of my Christian Scientist ancestors’ lurking ghosts, I heave myself onto the wagon and fasten the seat belt. Meanwhile, the young doc and her boss also suggested that I drop a vitamin B12 supplement every day, the B12 level being one aspect that turned up wanting in the vast complicated set of blood measurements they did. (Does it not strike you as odd that if you have a nutritional deficiency, only one of a wide array of factors would be lacking?). This stuff isn’t going to harm me. Whether it will help remained to be seen.

And, we might add, still remains to be seen!

Neither of these two changes seemed to have much effect, over the course of three or four weeks. Well: I feel a little more energetic — one symptom of B12 deficiency is fatigue. Was I fatigued in the long-ago time? Not exactly: I incline to call it lazy. But whatEVER. Yesterday I scrubbed 1868 square feet of tile without noticeable “fatigue.” 😀

As for the tingling feet and hands? Like an electric current flowing through them. All. The. Time.

Oh well.

I’d been applying a topical anesthetic in the form of lidocaine. Its effect, to the degree that it has one, was brief, at best. But then…oh, yes, THEN: a vague memory flitted across the fogged brain: that nightstand drawer held several vials of CBD cream and ointment given to me over the years by various friends & relatives. Hmmm…. What if? D’you suppose…?

Dig these out and smear them on the paws, one at a time over a couple of days. Only one of them has much effect, but it does make a noticeable improvement. Hot dang.

This elixir goes away quickly, because it’s just a sample size. But…it is to be noted that Sprouts, which has a store within walking distance of the Funny Farm, sells CBD nostrums! So yesterday, girding myself with face mask and disinfectant, I trotted into that fine emporium, where I found the cannabis nostrums under lock and key. Tracked down the woman who runs the cosmetics and patent meds department, and found to my surprise that she was pretty knowledgeable on the subject of cannabis-laced skin balms.

Picked one that she recommended, hauled it into the house, and lo! It actually does work pretty well! Doesn’t make the electrical effect go completely away, not by any means, but it does dull it enough to make it tolerable.

Meanwhile, we have the perennial blood pressure neurosis.

Since I’m going to have to trek back out to the Mayo toward the end of this month to do battle with the docs over my various lifestyle manifestations, I figured I’d better resume making a record of average BP measurements, since every time I so much as drive into a hospital or doctor’s office parking lot, my blood pressure heads for high orbit. I feel I need to have a record to show how the figures run in a less crazy-making environment.

At 2:30 in the morning on August 3, when I was awakened by the sensation of my pulse pounding, the blood pressure was 161/93. Holy shit! By 3:30 it had gone up to 167/107, freaking terrifying. This, however, was not the first time I’d experienced a night-time episode of astronomical blood pressure. Last time, it had dropped into the elevated but not terrifying range by the time I got to the ER, and within 45 minutes or an hour had gone back down to what was then “normal” for me. Also by now had learned that a “blood pressure crisis” — hurry on down to your nearest ER — is upwards of 180/120. So this time I refrained from panicking and just tested it about every half-hour or so, and yes: watched it fall to 143/90. Still way too high, but not immediately in stroke territory.

As this night watch proceeded, it occurred to me that because of the neuropathy I was swimming in ibuprofen. I’d been taking 200 mg four times a day — the last spiked with Benadryl in the (vain) hope of sleeping past 2 a.m. That’s 800 milligrams a day of the stuff. Holy ess aitch ai!

Turns out ibuprofen can jack up your blood pressure. And…it’s dangerous to ingest it along with cinnamon, a little experiment I’d decided to try by way of addressing the alleged prediabetes that also showed up in the blood tests.

So I decide to go cold turkey with that stuff.

It was dulling the tingling a little…but not enough to matter. In fact, the CBD gunk makes one helluva lot greater improvement.

Okay. So…

Now I’m tippling nary a drop of wine (or anything else, either).

And not gulping down piles of ibuprofen.

Two days into the ibuprofen fast: BP is 120/78

Awww c’mon! Gimme a break. I write it down but regard it as a fluke.

Another two days later, it drops to 105/72.

Right. Sure. I figure the BP machine must be busted. Make a note to take it up to the Walgreen’s to get it checked.

Next day: 118/78. Hmmm..that at least is in the more or less normal range. But I’ll believe it if I see it again. More than once.

And today: 118/72.

Dayum! It must’ve been the wine, not the old age and not the various neuroses that was pushing the blood pressure into the alarming range.

Well. We shall see if this proves true. I’ll believe it when I see it…at least eight or ten times.

As for the tingling extremities? The electrical current is about gone in the feet.

What next, dear Lord?

Using CBD for Peripheral Neuropathy

Magic Dragon to the Rescue