Harriet Whitcombe Wellness Tips Facebook ad: “7 Years of Numbing Feet gone in 2 weeks”

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I STOPPED TELLING MY PATIENTS TO RUB IN CAPSAICIN AND WAIT FOR THE GABAPENTIN To everyone swallowing gabapentin, pregabalin or amitriptyline, rubbing in capsaicin cream, buying that Senzio Miracle Balm™ everyone in the group swears by, spraying £7.99 magnesium oil off Amazon, taking B12 and alpha-lipoic acid, sat with your feet in one of those circulation machines off your feed — or being told to "just get your blood sugar down" for that burning and tingling in your feet, thinking you're doing the right thing... there is something nobody has ever told you. And I can't keep quiet about it any longer. "I watched a 64-year-old woman lose her right foot. It started as a bit of tingling in her toes of an evening. That was the day I decided to open my mouth." My name is Harriet Whitcombe. I was an NHS podiatrist for 35 years, the last 19 in a foot clinic outside Wakefield. I worked it out once, near the end: 23,412 pairs of feet. For 35 years I handed the same 4 things to every burning-feet patient who walked through my door. Rub the capsaicin in twice a day. I'll write to your GP about the gabapentin. Get your blood sugar down. Check your feet every day. Plus a photocopied foot care sheet with a little drawing on it. I gave that out every day. To everyone. Because that's what they taught us. Because that's what the guideline said. Then, 4 years ago, something happened I have not been able to put down since. It was gone six. I was locking up. Somebody knocked. A woman in her mid-50s, holding another woman up under the arm — the way you hold someone who daren't put a foot down. The one holding was Karen. The one being held was her older sister, Joan. Joan was grey. Sweating through her coat in November, walking on the outsides of her feet the way you walk on hot sand. "Please," Karen said. "Two years ago she was doing her garden. Now she's up 4 times a night with her feet hanging out the bed. The GP says it's her age." Joan was 62. That is not old. So I asked the question I'd asked every working day for 35 years. "What have you been using for it, love?" And Karen tipped a carrier bag out on my desk. Capsaicin cream, 2 tubes. Gabapentin, 1,200mg a day. Amitriptyline. Senzio Miracle Balm™. A CBD balm. Turmeric. Alpha-lipoic acid. A £39 nerve support off Amazon. Magnesium tablets, 5 months' worth. A £7.99 magnesium oil spray. Copper socks. A £129 circulation machine, still in the box it came back in. Cards for 2 lots of B12 injections. And in the middle of it, gone soft at the edges from 2 years in a handbag — my foot care sheet. My own handwriting in the margin. Then I picked up her nerve test. "Mild. Idiopathic." Her blood sugar had come back normal. Twice. She was not diabetic and never had been. Her hospital letter said it outright: there is no cure for idiopathic neuropathy, the aim is to manage symptoms. Manage. Not fix. My stomach turned over. Because in that second I saw every patient who had ever come back to me worse. Every one who told me the cream stung on top of the burning. Every one I'd asked "are you definitely rubbing it in properly, love?" — and every one I'd written down in the notes as poor compliance. I had blamed them. For years. For doing exactly what I told them to do. I said something to Joan I had never said to a patient in 35 years. "Stop the capsaicin. Stop it tonight." I didn't sleep. I got up at 2 and read the guideline. The actual document, all of it, for the first time in my career. For this kind of nerve pain there are 4 tablets on the list. Amitriptyline. Duloxetine. Gabapentin. Pregabalin. And the instruction is this: try one. If it doesn't work, try another. If that doesn't work, try another. That is the entire plan. 4 tablets and a coin toss. And the capsaicin I'd been handing out like sweets is in there as something to consider for people who can't stomach the tablets. That is what it is for. It was never treating anything. Then the bit that finished me off. In 2019, gabapentin and pregabalin were made Class C controlled drugs in this country. Controlled. Like the strong stuff behind the counter. Nobody had ever told Joan that. Including me. Then I went looking for the independent research — the work that doesn't come from the company selling the product. And I understood how all of it actually works. The gabapentin, the pregabalin, the amitriptyline. A pill in your belly cannot reach a nerve ending in your foot. It doesn't touch the fire, it sedates everything between here and there. Joan was on 1,200mg, her feet burned every night regardless, and she'd stand in her own kitchen and forget what she'd come in for. One woman in Karen's group wrote that hers had "helped her forget her own name." The magnesium tablets. Right mineral — but your gut burns off nearly all of it, and it's the wrong end of you anyway. Joan took 2 a day for 5 months and never missed one. Her feet burned every single night of those 5 months. The B12 injections and the alpha-lipoic acid. If you're genuinely short of B12 it helps — and that's the one thing they do test for, and hers came back fine. She was topping up something she was never short of. Senzio Miracle Balm™, the £129 machine, the copper socks, the £39 nerve support. Every one sold to you on your circulation. Put your hand on a burning foot. It's warm. It's pink. That is blood arriving perfectly well. It was never the blood. Not one of them gets a scrap of magnesium down to a nerve. She was rubbing on hope. The turmeric, the CBD balm. Same again. And the sensible things I'd watched a thousand patients do first — wider shoes, cutting the sugar right down, half a stone off. None of it ever cooled the fire, because none of it goes near where the fire starts. Which isn't the skin. Isn't even really the foot. And the capsaicin. My capsaicin. That's chilli. It burns the top of your skin to distract you, then it fades — and it comes back meaner, because now it stings going on as well. It sits on the surface, and the trouble was never on the surface. It's like watering the leaves when the roots are dry. And heat is the last thing a burning foot needs. My patients had all worked that out on their own, years before I did — sat on cold bathroom tiles at 3:00 AM, a fan at the end of the bed, a foot out from under the duvet in February. Their own bodies had been telling them. And I handed them a tube of chilli and told them to use it twice a day. For 35 years we were all sanding the rust off a pipe and wondering why the bastard kept coming back. I asked Karen to come in without her sister. "The capsaicin wasn't helping her. I think it was making it worse." Silence. Then, very quietly: "But her podiatrist always told her to use it." "I was her podiatrist. For 9 years." She started to cry. "So did she do this to herself? Doing what you told her?" I could not answer her. Because the answer was yes. For Joan it was already too late. By then she couldn't feel the floor at all. She went down in her hallway one night and couldn't tell Karen how it had happened. After that it was a stick. A blister she never felt turned into an ulcer that wouldn't close, and she lost the foot the following spring. Then a chair. Then a bed. 18 months after that evening, I stood at her funeral. She was 64. She never got back out to that garden. Karen told me what her sister said to her near the end, and I've never got it out of my head. "Don't let it get you like it got me, love." From that day I went looking for something that actually reached the nerve. I was 63, retired, with nothing left to lose. It took me the best part of a year, and it came down to 2 things. The first was one comment, buried under a post at 4 in the morning, from a woman in Wales. "My feet burned for 4 years. I tried it all. What finally settled it wasn't a pill. It was getting magnesium down to the nerve itself. 4 weeks, and the fire went out." Magnesium. Down to the nerve. Not down your throat. I read it 10 times. The second was the stories I'd been filing under nonsense my whole career. The woman whose feet went quiet for a fortnight in Spain and started again the week she got home — she thought it was the sunshine. The man who soaked his feet in salt water for 3 weeks and swore it was the only thing that ever touched it. It isn't the sunshine and it isn't luck. Sea water is loaded with magnesium, and it goes in through the skin. Nobody swallowed anything. The mineral simply arrived where the nerve was, and the fire went out. That is the one thing none of us were doing. Here's what I understand now, the way I'd tell you across a kitchen table. After 50 your body holds a great deal less magnesium than it used to — 3 in 4 of us are short. And your nerves run on it. The nerves that reach your feet are the longest in your whole body, so they're the first to run dry. That is why it starts down there and nowhere else. Your feet were never the problem. They're the far end of the longest wire you've got. Magnesium has one job inside that nerve. It sits on a gate and holds the calcium out. That's what lets a nerve fire once, then go quiet. Think of a gate with a spring on it — the magnesium is the hand holding it shut. Take the magnesium away and that hand is gone. The gate sticks open, calcium floods in, and calcium does not know how to switch off. So the nerve fires, and fires, and fires — with nothing there to burn. In 23,412 pairs of feet I heard it described every way there is. Boiling water poured over both feet. Broken glass under the soles. A bedsheet brushing your toes making you gasp out loud. The weight of the duvet being too much to bear. The jolt that has you sat up at 3:00 AM. Every one of those is a nerve screaming with the gate jammed open. There is no burn. Sit with that. Your feet are not being damaged in the night. They are reporting a fire that isn't there. And where the magnesium has been gone longest, the coat around the nerve frays — that's your numb patches. Burning in one spot and dead in the next, on the same foot. Not 2 problems. The same one, at 2 stages. The "neuropathy" everybody keeps managing is only what leaks out the end of it. And now 3 things you've already lived through make sense. One. Some nights it rages and some nights it's almost quiet, and you can't work out why. Permanent damage cannot do that. Dead nerves don't take a Tuesday off. A shortage runs out and gets topped up, day to day. Joan was convinced her circulation was packing in. It never was. Two. Your test came back "mild" or "idiopathic" and explained nothing. I looked that word up myself — idiopathic is doctor for we don't know. It doesn't mean nothing's wrong. It means they were looking in the wrong place. They measured how fast the nerve fires. They checked your sugar. Not one of us ever asked what the nerve was short OF. Three. Cold helps and heat makes it worse. Your body has been telling you for years. And the cream I gave you was chilli. Two more you'll recognise. The cramps — calves seizing at 2 in the morning, hard as wood, stood on the landing walking them off. Magnesium is also what tells a muscle to let go. Same shortage, different end of the wire. And the way it travels: toes, foot, ankle, calf — and then one day you're peeling potatoes and your fingertips are buzzing. Not 4 things going wrong at once. One thing, spreading. So the answer was getting magnesium down to that nerve. Which sounds simple until you try it. Epsom salt baths? Wrong form — Epsom is sulfate, the molecule is too big to get through skin. It sits on top and washes off. Tablets? Your gut burns most of it off, and it's the wrong end of you regardless. Magnesium oil spray? I bought one myself. £7.99, 12,183 five-star reviews. It did something for about an hour and then I was awake anyway — which is exactly what the groups say: helps a bit, wears off by midnight. And 249 of the reviews underneath are people saying it stings, itches and leaves them sticky. Because it's Epsom salts in a bottle. Sulfate again. That was the moment it clicked. The mineral was never the problem. The way they were delivering it was. I found it through a former colleague, of all people. A small British outfit, no reps, no adverts on the telly. They'd spent their time on the one thing nobody else had bothered with: getting magnesium through skin, down to where the nerve is. It's called NuraCalm. A cream, not a pill. It uses magnesium chloride — the one form that genuinely soaks through the skin instead of sitting on it like the Epsom does. That's what gives the nerve what it needs to put a hand back on that gate. The MSM breaks it down small enough to slip through the skin. The vitamin B6 helps the nerve carry a clean signal, so it settles instead of misfiring. There's arnica for the ache. And just enough menthol that it goes cool the second it's on — cool, never hot. But understand me: the menthol is the least important thing in that tube. The menthol is the doorbell. The magnesium is the visitor. You rub it in once or twice a day, on the soles and the toes and anywhere else it's reached you, and you give it 4 to 6 weeks. The first night you'll feel the cool and a bit of quiet. The real job — feeding that nerve until it stops screaming — takes weeks. Anybody who tells you different is selling you something. Nothing to swallow. Nothing to fog your head. Nothing to clash with your other tablets. And a 90-day money-back promise, which is the only reason a woman as sceptical as me tried it at all. I used it on my own feet for 6 months before I'd put it in anybody else's hands. I had done enough damage in my life with things I hadn't checked. Then I thought about Karen. I rang her — and found out she'd had it herself for 15 months and never said a word. The same feet as her sister. She'd done exactly what Joan did: 9 minutes with a GP who'd never met her, out the door with gabapentin. Capsaicin from the chemist that was almost a miracle for a fortnight and then came back meaner. 16 weeks on the list for podiatry, 14 months for the pain clinic, £55 she couldn't afford for one private appointment — and what she got for her £55 was the same foot care leaflet, 20 years on. They'd always said the bad nerves ran in that family. Nobody ever told them they were both treating the wrong thing. She'd joined one of those Facebook neuropathy groups. 31,000 members, all awake at 3 in the morning, all with a tip. Senzio Miracle Balm™, which half the group swore by. B12. Turmeric. Copper socks. £437 in 4 months on things that never got within an inch of that nerve. And she still couldn't pull a sock on without the wool feeling like a cheese grater on the skin. Up 3 or 4 times a night, sat on the cold bathroom tiles, swearing into her sleeve so she didn't wake her husband. The woman who used to dance at every wedding had been googling "am I going to lose my feet" at 2 in the morning. She was 58. Exactly where her sister was at 60. I gave her a tub. I said: stop the capsaicin, rub this into the soles every night, give it 6 weeks — and if it's done nothing, I'll pay you back myself out of my own pocket. Week 1: she woke twice instead of 5 times. Week 2: she slept a full night through with her feet UNDER the covers, and rang me crying in the morning. The good kind. Week 3: she came down her own stairs in the dark without holding the rail. By week 5 she was putting proper laced shoes on for a wedding — first time in 15 months — and she danced. And the daft thing that convinced her more than any of it: around week 3 she'd started rubbing it into her calves properly instead of as an afterthought, and the cramps went. She'd had those over a year and never once thought they had anything to do with her feet. The 3:00 AM fire. The fan. The socks she couldn't bear. The buzzing in her fingertips at the sink. One by one, they came back to her. I checked her over at her kitchen table, the way I'd checked 23,412 pairs of them. I ran my thumb along the sole. No flinch — the first time I'd done that she'd have hit the ceiling. In 35 years I hardly ever saw feet that angry settle that well without years of tablets. Then she said the thing I think about most. Not the sleeping. Not the shoes. "Harriet, I've stopped testing the floor with my toes before I stand up. I just stand up." That was 8 months ago. Not a single 3:00 AM since. This is not a good fortnight that wears off. It has held. Now — the part that makes me angry. And it answers the question you've been asking since I named it: if this works, why has no podiatrist in the country heard of it? All they're allowed to offer you is those 4 tablets. The ones that fog your head and never reach the fire, 2 of them controlled drugs since 2019, with the dose only ever creeping up. So your GP gives you the little he's allowed and puts you on a list. And the list does not move. I know, because I was the list. I was the 20-minute appointment at the end of it, with a photocopier and a leaflet. The system isn't built to fix the cause. It's built to manage you while you wait — it says so in your own hospital letter. And nobody — not the GP, not the podiatrist, not the chemist, and certainly not whoever is selling Senzio Miracle Balm™ or that £129 machine on your feed — gets paid, or is even allowed, to tell a woman in Wakefield to rub magnesium into the soles of her feet. The system's hands are tied. Yours are not. One thing I have to be straight about: the people who make it are a small British outfit. No pharmaceutical budget, no adverts, small batches, and they do run out. There's nobody knocking on surgery doors with a branded pen to tell your GP it exists — and that's the only reason you've never heard of it. Compare it to what you've already spent. £55 for a leaflet you already had. £437 in 4 months on a carrier bag of things that never reached the nerve. 2 years of capsaicin for Joan, and a foot gone at the end of it. I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm asking you to try it for 90 days. If your feet are no better you send it back and get every penny returned. The only thing you can lose is a few more weeks of the same. I couldn't save Joan. I had 9 years, 23,412 pairs of feet worth of experience, and I still sent her home with a photocopy and a tube of chilli. Karen I could. You're still here. And you're probably reading this at 3 in the morning with your feet hanging out from under the duvet and something in the bathroom cabinet that isn't working. Don't walk Joan's road. Don't "learn to live with it" — that isn't a treatment, that's a sentence, and your feet get worse while you serve it. Get the same cream I gave Karen here https://try.nuracalm.com/fb1-nervepain-listcicle Do it tonight. Not next week when it's "a bit better". Tonight. Edit: A few people have messaged to say they bought NuraCalm and it did nothing. Every single one of them bought it off Amazon. Don't. They only sell the real thing on their own site — there are cheap copies on there with next to no magnesium in them. Buy direct: https://try.nuracalm.com/fb1-nervepain-listcicle P.S. — If you take one thing from a retired podiatrist who got it wrong for 35 years: it isn't swallowed, and it isn't left sitting on top of your skin. It has to get down to the nerve. On the spot where it burns. Every night. That's why 5 months of magnesium tablets and a £7.99 spray did nothing for you — and it's why this does. https://try.nuracalm.com/fb1-nervepain-listcicle P.P.S. — If your feet drive you out from under the covers more than once a night, that's your sign. That's exactly where Joan was at 62, and where Karen was at 58. And if the cramps have started in your calves, or your fingertips have begun buzzing at the sink, that's the same shortage spreading. Start tonight, give it 4 weeks, and you've got 90 days to change your mind. That's more time than the NHS will give you for an appointment. https://try.nuracalm.com/fb1-nervepain-listcicle — Harriet Whitcombe, retired NHS podiatrist, Wakefield

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7 Years of Numbing Feet gone in 2 weeks

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