Carol Ellison Facebook ad: “The Tablet I Hand Out Every Day That I'd Never Take Myself”

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I dispense metformin and gabapentin to people with diabetes hundreds of times a week. When my own feet started going numb, I refused the gabapentin. Let me tell you why. My name is Carol Ellison. I'm 62 years old. I've been a registered pharmacist for 34 years, the last 20 at a Boots in Nottingham. I stand behind that counter six days a week, half eight to half four, handing white paper bags across the counter to people who trust me with their lives. Metformin. Gabapentin. The two I hand to my diabetic customers more than any other. I counted the diabetic scripts once on a quiet Tuesday in February because I was curious. Hundreds a week. Metformin to hold the sugar down, and gabapentin for the ones whose feet have started to burn. I smile. I say "take it at the same time every day." I say "let us know how you get on with it." I peel the label off the printer, fix it to the box, slip it into the bag, and call the next name. I do this hundreds of times a week. And when the burning started in my own feet, I refused the gabapentin. I need you to understand what that means, a pharmacist who hands gabapentin across the counter every day and won't put it in her own body. I need you to understand why, because if you're diabetic and on metformin, and the feeling has started to go from your feet, and your GP has just mentioned a tablet called gabapentin, what I'm about to tell you could change everything. I know what's in these tablets. Not from a leaflet. Not from a television advert. I know because I did four years of pharmacy, two years of clinical placements, because I've read the patient information leaflets so many times the language lives in my head like song lyrics, and because I've watched what happens to diabetic feet for 34 years from three feet away. I see them when they collect their first box of metformin. Nervous. Hopeful. Trusting. "My GP says this will keep my sugar down." I see them a year or two later. "Carol, my feet have started burning at night. Is that the diabetes?" I see them the year after that. "There's a patch on my foot I can't really feel. The GP says to keep an eye on it. He's given me these for the burning." And they hand me the gabapentin script. I see them a year after that. They're holding the counter with both hands. They're wearing the wide, soft shoes now, the ones you buy when nothing else will do. They mention the numbness again and I say what I'm trained to say: "Have a word with your GP." And then one day their name changes on my screen. A referral to the foot clinic. Then a district nurse. Then, for some of them, the flag that says the thing you never want to read. I've watched more diabetic customers than I can count lose the feeling in their feet. Some lost a toe. Some lost a foot. And a few I watched all the way to the flag on my screen that says deceased, from a sore they never felt, because the feeling had left years before it turned. Let me tell you about one of them. Derek Marsden. 63 years old. Retired toolmaker from Hucknall. Came in every 28 days for his metformin like the calendar was tattooed on his wrist. Collected it himself, never sent his wife. Always wore a Forest shirt on match days. Always asked how my daughter was getting on. Started mentioning the burning around a year in. This heat in his feet at night that woke him, he said, feet on fire with nothing touching them. "Carol, is it the diabetes? Is it the tablet?" I told him to have a word with his GP. The GP said it was some nerve involvement, common with the diabetes, keep an eye on it. Gave him gabapentin for the burning. It took the edge off. But by the next year he was gripping the counter with both hands just to stay upright while I rang him through. He'd started watching his own feet on the way out of the shop. "Getting old, Carol," he laughed, but I could see he wasn't sure of his own feet under him. The year after that, his wife Janet started collecting the prescription. Derek was "having a hard time getting about." She said there was a sore on the bottom of his foot he hadn't felt happen. The GP was managing it. Derek's HbA1c, the whole time, was exactly where they wanted it. Well controlled. The box ticked at every review. Then Janet came in alone one morning with a look on her face I've seen too many times. The sore Derek never felt had turned. The infection got into the bone, then his blood. They took the foot. Then more. It wasn't enough. His HbA1c at his last check was spot on. The GP had called his diabetes well-controlled. The metformin had done its job on the number. The box was ticked. Derek was gone. I went to the back room after Janet left. I sat on the step by the dispensing machine and I cried for ten minutes. Hundreds of prescriptions a week. I dispense them. I smile. I hand them over. And I know something about what's happening to those feet that the people taking the tablets will never be told unless they go looking. The burning started in my own feet two years ago. I'm diabetic myself. On metformin for years, my sugar always well controlled. And then the tingling started at night, and then the burning at three in the morning, and then a patch on my left sole I'd press with my thumb and feel almost nothing. I went to my GP, a woman I like, a woman I trust in every other area of medicine. And she said exactly what I knew she'd say before she said it. Word for word. Like I'd written the script myself. "Carol, that's some nerve involvement, common with the diabetes. We'll keep an eye on it. If the burning gets bad, I'll start you on gabapentin." I sat in her surgery and felt my face arrange itself into the expression I give customers. The smile. The nod. But something cold settled in my stomach. Because I knew what she wasn't telling me. Not because she's a bad GP. Because the system that trained her never taught her to ask the question. I've read the gabapentin leaflet a thousand times. I know exactly what it does. It quiets the burning. It settles the misfiring nerve enough to get you through the night. Here's what it does not do. Here's what I've never once heard a GP explain when they hand it over. Here's what took me years of watching people deteriorate three feet from my counter to finally understand: Gabapentin does not fix the reason the nerve is burning in the first place. It overrides it. Think of it this way. Your front door is stuck. You've got two options: figure out why the hinge has seized and repair it, or get a crowbar and force it every morning. Gabapentin is the crowbar. Every single day. Forcing the alarm quiet. Silencing the signal the nerve is screaming. The burning stops. The GP ticks the box. The system moves on. But the hinge is still broken. The reason the nerve was burning, the coating stripping off it, is still there. Untouched. Getting worse. Every day the tablet forces the burning quiet, the numbness spreads underneath it. And a foot that has gone fully numb can't feel the stone, or the blister, or the sore that finally doesn't heal. That was Derek. His burning was managed. His nerve kept dying underneath. And the thing that actually took his foot, the sore he never felt, kept coming, quietly, while his numbers looked brilliant on the chart. Now, I want to be very clear about one tablet in that bag, because this is where the angry version of this story always goes wrong. The metformin is not the villain. I dispense it. I believe in it. It holds your sugar down, and high sugar does its own damage to the nerve, so you need it, and you never, ever stop it. Derek needed his. I need mine. But here is what nobody tells you. The metformin that holds your sugar down quietly drains a vitamin your nerves cannot live without. Every single day you take it. It is printed in the drug's own information. It has been known for decades. As many as one in three long-term users run short. That vitamin is B12. Every nerve running down to your feet is wrapped in a living coating, like the insulation on a wire. Your body rebuilds that coating every single day, and to do it, it needs B12 more than anything else. Drain the B12, and the coating thins. The bare nerve fires when nothing is touching it, that's the burning. Then it goes silent, that's the numbness. Then comes the sore you never feel. Everybody watches the sugar number. Drive it down with metformin and the chart says you're protected. But the sugar number was never the thing taking these feet. The numb foot is not the disease. It's the smoke. The fire is the nerve, starving on the one thing the tablet has been draining, that nobody ever put back. Gabapentin unscrews the warning light and tells you the engine is fine. The engine is the nerve. And here's what the crowbar costs you, on top of never fixing a thing. The fog. The drowsiness. The unsteadiness that makes a fall more likely, which is the last thing a diabetic with numb feet needs. The dose that creeps up, and up. And underneath all of it, the numbness spreading, because the tablet was never designed to rebuild the nerve. It was designed to quiet it. I see this every single day from behind my counter. And for years I couldn't say a word. If I lean across the counter and say "you know that tablet just quiets the burning while the nerve keeps dying, and nobody's put back the one thing your metformin is draining," I lose my registration. I lose my career. I lose the pension I've been building for 34 years, my grandchildren's future, everything I've worked for. So I smiled. And I handed over the bag. And I hated myself a little more every time. But when my own GP looked at me across her desk and said she'd start me on gabapentin the day the burning got bad, I said no. She looked at me like I'd slapped her. "Carol, you know the guidelines as well as I do." "I know the guidelines," I said. "And I know what's not in them." She issued the script anyway, ready for when I wanted it. It appeared on my own screen, my name, my date of birth, on the same label I stick to boxes hundreds of times a week. I never dispensed it. It sat in the system until it expired. The system flagged it. I cleared the flag myself. My GP thinks I'll fill it if the burning gets bad. I haven't corrected her. I know how that sounds, the pharmacist who hands it to everyone else and won't take it herself. But I've watched too many people go down the road she wants me on. And I knew there was another one, because I'd gone looking for it. I kept taking my metformin the whole time, mind. That was never in question. You never stop the tablet holding your sugar down. What I refused was the crowbar, and what I went looking for was the hinge. I have access to the databases most people don't. The actual studies behind the summaries. I spent months reading everything I could find on diabetic neuropathy and B12. And one thing kept coming up, over and over. It was never that B12 doesn't work. B12 is exactly what the nerve is crying out for. The problem is the form, and what your body does to it before it can ever help you. So I did what I imagine you are about to do right now. I ordered a high-strength B12 from the first brand that came up. DO NOT DO THAT. Here is what happens the moment you swallow it. Almost every B12 on the shelf, the ones in my own pharmacy, the ones in Holland and Barrett, the ones on Amazon, is cyanocobalamin. The cheap synthetic form. Your body has to convert it before a nerve can use it, and on metformin, past fifty, you can barely do that at all. And it's a tablet you swallow, into a gut that after fifty absorbs almost none of it, with the metformin pushing that lower still. So it passes straight through you. It's like posting a letter to a house with no letterbox. It never gets in. You swallow the tablet. You absorb almost nothing. You feel nothing. Because nothing that could help you ever reached the nerve. This is why every customer who has told me they tried B12 from Boots and saw no results is telling the absolute truth. The problem was never B12. The problem was the form, and what their gut did to it before it could ever help them. What actually reaches the nerve is the active form. Methylcobalamin. Already converted, so a starved nerve can use it straight away, without the conversion step a diabetic on metformin can barely manage. Held under the tongue, not swallowed, so it goes straight into the blood, past the gut that stopped absorbing years ago. At a real dose. Around 5,000 micrograms, not the few hundred hidden on most labels. And with the full B team alongside it. B6 to settle the misfiring that drives the burning. B1 and B3 to fuel the repair and open the tiny vessels that feed the nerve. Folate to finish it, because B12 on its own stalls halfway. I did what any pharmacist does before she trusts anything. I went looking for the flaw. I spent two weeks trying to poke holes in it. And I found the catch. The catch isn't B12. The catch is that almost nobody sells it in the form, the dose, and the delivery that actually reach the nerve. The label tricks are everywhere. "High strength." "1000 micrograms." Language designed to sound precise while telling you nothing about whether a single microgram will ever get past your gut. Cyanocobalamin, not methylcobalamin. Swallowed, not sublingual. A few hundred micrograms, not thousands. B12 on its own, when the nerve needs the whole team. I checked every B12 on my own pharmacy shelves. I checked the ones in Holland and Barrett. I checked the ones on Amazon. Not one of them was the active form, at a real dose, under the tongue, with the full complex, and a published certificate telling you what's actually in the bottle. Then I found Olvexa. Small operation. Not a household name. No television adverts. No endcap display at Boots. Just the four things I'd never seen all together on any other B12 in 34 years. The active form, methylcobalamin. A real 5,000 microgram dose. Held under the tongue. The full B complex, B6, B1, B3 and folate, alongside it. And a Certificate of Analysis, published, for every batch. The actual content. Verified. Not "high strength." Not "up to." The real number, printed, where I could check it. I did what a pharmacist does. I didn't take their word for it. I rang them. I asked for the certificate. I checked the form and the dose against what the research actually used. I made them prove it before I put it anywhere near my own mother. It held up. I took the first dropper under my tongue the next morning with my tea, alongside the metformin I never stopped. No other changes. I didn't start the gabapentin. I kept eating the way I'd always eaten, decent but not saintly, a glass of wine most evenings, a roast on Sundays when the family comes round. Week one, not much, and I knew to expect that. A nerve starved for years doesn't turn round in days. By the second week, I realised the burning that used to have me hanging my feet out of the covers hadn't come. I'd slept the whole night in the same position for the first time in months. By week six, I stood barefoot on the kitchen tiles one morning and felt the cold of them under the edge of that numb patch, the one I'd pressed my thumb into for the better part of two years feeling nothing. There was something there. I went back to my GP for a foot check twelve weeks in. She ran the filament test, the thin strand pressed against ten points on the sole. I felt nine. At the start of the year I'd have felt four. She looked at the result, then looked at me, then looked back at the strip. "What are you doing differently?" "Taking a B12," I said. "Carol, B12 doesn't" "Not the Boots kind," I said. "The active form. Under the tongue. With the full complex. Alongside my metformin, which I never stopped." She wrote "patient reports taking B12 supplement" in my notes. I could tell she wasn't sure she believed it. I don't need her to believe it. The filament believes it. Here's what I now understand, not from reading about it, but from living it, about what a real B12 for numb feet has to do. It has to be the active form. Methylcobalamin, already converted. Not the cheap cyanocobalamin your body can't convert on metformin. It has to go under the tongue. Straight into the blood, past the gut that stopped absorbing. Not a swallowed tablet that passes through you. It has to be a real dose. Around 5,000 micrograms, the amount in the research. Not the few hundred hidden on the label. It has to bring the whole team. B6, B1, B3 and folate, or the repair stalls halfway. And it has to print the certificate. If a brand won't tell you what's actually in the capsule, they either don't know or don't want you to. Either answer should worry you. Five things. All five. I checked every B12 I could find in the UK. Not one hit all five, except the one I'm telling you about. I started giving it to people I love. My mum. 84. Diabetic, on her metformin for years. Her feet had been burning at night and she'd gone into the wide, soft shoes because nothing else felt safe. She'd stopped going to church on Sundays because she couldn't stand up from the pew without my dad pulling her up by the arm. I told her to add the Olvexa alongside her metformin. I did not tell her to stop the tablet, that's between her and her GP. I told her to add this. Three weeks later she rang me on a Tuesday morning. "Carol, I can feel the kitchen floor again." "What do you mean?" "I mean I stood on it this morning and I felt it cold under my feet. And I put my proper shoes on, not the wide ones, and they were fine. Is that possible?" Her next foot check, the nurse ran the filament and told her the feeling had come back further than the year before. On the same metformin she'd been on for years. The only thing that had changed was the Olvexa. My brother Mark. 59. Diabetic. Stubborn as a brick wall. Feet going numb and doing nothing about it. I posted him a bottle without asking. Wrote on a Post-it note: "One dropper under the tongue every morning, or I'm telling Mum." He took it because he knew I wasn't joking. Eight weeks later his GP told him the feeling in his feet had improved and to keep doing whatever he was doing. Mark didn't change a thing except the dropper. My colleague Rachel, another pharmacist, works the afternoon shift after me. Diabetic, on her feet all day, the burning so bad by the end of a shift she could barely think. I gave her a bottle. Three weeks later she said it was the first time in a long while she'd got through a shift without her feet on fire. I've now recommended Olvexa to more than twenty people I personally know and follow up with. And almost every one of them, the burning eased and the feeling started coming back. Not just their say-so. Their filament results, checked by their own nurses. Here's why I'm writing this. I'm a pharmacist. I've held this registration for 34 years. What I'm telling you could cost me professionally if the wrong person at head office reads it. But I can't keep standing behind that counter, watching the burning start, watching the numbness spread, watching the wide shoes come out, watching the foot clinic referrals, watching the odd name turn into a flag on my screen, without saying something. I can't keep knowing what I know and staying quiet. Derek Marsden is gone. His HbA1c was brilliant the whole way. The box was ticked at every review. And a sore he couldn't feel took his foot and then his life. Because nobody fed the nerve. Nobody put back the one thing his metformin had been draining. And the tablet he took faithfully for the burning just forced it quiet while the real damage carried on underneath. I dispense the prescriptions because it's my job. I won't take the gabapentin myself because I know what it does and what it doesn't. And every morning I take one dropper under my tongue, alongside the metformin I never stopped, because it does the one thing hundreds of prescriptions a week can't. It feeds the nerve. The one I take, and the one I gave my mum, is Olvexa. The active form of B12, methylcobalamin. A real 5,000 microgram dose. Held under the tongue. The full B complex. Third-party tested, certificate for every batch. Taken alongside the metformin you never stop. You do not take anything away. You put back the one thing it's been draining. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. If the burning doesn't settle and the feeling doesn't start to come back, you send it back and get every penny returned. No argument. No fine print. It's not on Amazon. It's not at Boots. It's not at Holland and Barrett. It's not on my pharmacy shelf. It's direct from their own site, because there are already cheap swallowed cyanocobalamin sound-alikes using the same words on the label, the exact stuff I threw out of my own cupboard. If you're diabetic and on metformin, and the feeling has started going out of your feet, please, put back what the tablet has been draining. Not for me. For whoever's sitting across from you at the dinner table tonight. 👉 https://tryolvexa.com/pages/neuropathy — Carol E., MRPharmS Registered Pharmacist, 34 years Nottingham area P.S. I need to be direct about something. I'm not anti-medication. I'm a pharmacist. I believe in pharmaceuticals. I dispense metformin, antibiotics, statins, insulin, and I believe in every one of them. I believe in metformin especially, it holds your sugar down and you need it, and nothing I've said means you should ever stop it. What I don't believe in is handing someone a tablet that just quiets the burning while the nerve keeps dying underneath, and calling that treatment. Olvexa isn't a replacement for your metformin or for medical care. It's the thing that does what the gabapentin can't. P.P.S. If you're on metformin and your GP is happy with your sugar, please don't stop reading. Derek's numbers were brilliant. His GP was chuffed. The sugar number was never the whole threat. The starving nerve was. You take the Olvexa alongside your metformin, it doesn't replace it, it puts back the one thing it drains. And the side effects you've been told to live with? If you're on gabapentin and you're foggy and unsteady and it's never brought the feeling back, that's the tablet doing what it does. My mum added the one thing that does what the tablet can't. She's still on her metformin. She just feels the floor again. P.P.P.S. If your husband is the stubborn type, the type who says "the GP knows best" and won't listen to you, here's what I did with my brother Mark. I didn't argue. I didn't send him studies. I posted a bottle to his house with a Post-it note. He took it because it was easier than arguing with me. Eight weeks later his own GP told him the feeling in his feet had come back. You don't have to win the argument. You just have to get the bottle in the house. Put it next to his morning cuppa. One dropper under the tongue. He'll take it because you asked, the same way Mark did. And in a couple of months, the feeling coming back will do the convincing you can't. P.P.P.P.S. The 90-day guarantee is real. I checked it before I recommended it to my mum, if you think I'd put my own mother on something without confirming the refund policy with my own eyes, you don't know pharmacists. If the feeling doesn't start to come back, you return it and get every penny. A couple of months from now you'll either have your feet back, or you'll have your money back. There's no scenario where you lose. P.P.P.P.P.S. It's not on Amazon. It's not at Boots. It's not at Holland and Barrett. It's not on my pharmacy shelf. They ship direct through one website. I've already seen cheap swallowed B12 online using words like "high strength" and "active" on the cheap cyanocobalamin that never worked in the first place. From 34 years of reading labels, I can tell you: if it isn't the active methylcobalamin, under the tongue, at a real dose, with the full complex and a published certificate, you're wasting your money. P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Hundreds of prescriptions a week. I handed a diabetic gentleman his metformin this morning at twenty past eight, and a new gabapentin script with it, for the burning that's just started in his feet. He looked at me with the same nervous hope they all have, and said "the GP says this'll help with my feet." I smiled. I handed him the bag. And I thought about Derek. And I thought about this post. And I thought: maybe he'll see it. Maybe someone who loves him will see it. Maybe it's not too late for him the way it was too late for Derek. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm risking my registration writing this gone midnight on my day off. Put back what the tablet drains. Please. 👉 https://tryolvexa.com/pages/neuropathy

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tryolvexa.com

The Tablet I Hand Out Every Day That I'd Never Take Myself

Active B12, 5,000mcg methylcobalamin, under the tongue, with the full B complex, for numb feet on metformin.