The Neuropathy Companion Facebook ad: “Support healthy nerves and circulation every day”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

2240251983444058

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

0

Niche

Supplements & Wellness

How we count

Ad text

My feet are usually tingling in the mornings, but today's different... I am sixty-three. I am not, this morning, on the couch with my feet up because by ten o'clock my feet always seem to need that. I am not telling my husband that I am going to skip the walk we used to take after breakfast because I'm just a little tired today. I am not looking at the laundry on the chair in the hallway and the dish in the sink and the bird feeder that needs filling and quietly choosing one of them, because three is too many on a Wednesday morning when you are sixty-three. I am doing all three of those things this morning before noon, because that is what a Wednesday morning has been for me since the second week of January. And before I tell you the rest of this letter I want you to know I have been a careful woman my entire adult life and I am not telling you any of this lightly. Let me back up. My name is Carolyn. I retired three years ago after twenty-nine years as a school nurse in our small town's elementary and middle schools. I knew every child in our town for almost three decades. I knew which families had which insurance and which didn't. I knew which kids needed a snack at ten in the morning to get through fourth-period math and which ones needed quieter places to take a test. I was diagnosed Type 2 at fifty-one. I have been on metformin since the week of the diagnosis. My A1c sits where Dr. Patel wants it. My blood pressure is fine. My weight is where it has been for a decade. There is nothing on my chart that anyone would write a different prescription about. About a year and a half after I retired, my feet began telling me they were not happy. Tingling at night. Then numbness in patches. Then the small electric-shock feeling that woke me at three in the morning. I went to Dr. Patel about it. I went again. By the third visit she told me she was going to write a prescription for Gabapentin, and I told her I wanted to think about it for a few weeks before I started. She told me she understood. She told me to come back when I had thought about it. I did not go back. Not because I was ignoring her advice — she is a careful woman and she gave me good advice. I went home and I did what a school nurse would do, which was look up everything I could find about Gabapentin and about diabetic neuropathy, and what I read made me want to look harder at the rest of what my body might be telling me before I added a prescription that was going to take a while to taper off if I ever wanted to stop. I read for about three months. I did not find what I was looking for. I found a great deal of marketing in supplement bottles in the drugstore that I did not trust. I found very careful research in the literature that I did trust, but the research and the bottles in the aisle were not, as far as I could tell, talking about the same thing. I let it go for about a year. The feet kept getting a little louder. Last fall — October, I think — our senior center put on a refresher class for people in town who had been diabetic for ten or more years. Dr. Patel had recommended it at my annual. I went mostly because Dr. Patel had asked me to, and partly because I was tired of telling myself I was going to figure this out on my own. There were twelve of us in the class. I knew most of the women by sight from forty years of small-town living. We sat in folding chairs in a circle in the community room. The woman next to me was named Margaret. She was, I would have guessed, seventy or seventy-one. She told the room she had been diabetic for twenty-six years. She had grown up in a Mennonite community out in the western part of the state. She had been in our town for the last twelve. After the class let out, I stayed to help fold the chairs. Margaret stayed too. I told her what I had been wrestling with. The whole thing. The feet at three a.m. The Gabapentin prescription I had been turning over. The reading I had been doing. The fact that I had not been able to find what I was looking for in the supplement aisle. She listened. She did not interrupt. When I was done she said: Carolyn, I had the same wrestle eight years ago, with my own feet, and I want to be careful what I tell you because I am one woman and you are looking at one woman and bodies are different. I will tell you what I added, and the form it was in, and why I picked it. Then you should go read for as long as it takes you to be ready, and you should call your pharmacist before you do anything, and you should mention it to Dr. Patel. She told me she had been taking a small B-vitamin formula every morning for the better part of eight years. She told me she had picked it because the B vitamins in it were in their active, body-ready forms — pharmaceutical-grade L-methylfolate instead of ordinary folic acid, and methylcobalamin instead of the cheap form of B12. She told me she had specifically looked for that, because for years she had been taking a standard B-complex and her feet had not noticed. She told me the brand was small. The company is called Pre-DX. It is run by a man named Joe Hunter out of an outfit called Southeast Healthcare Consultants. She told me her feet had quieted within about three months of adding it. She told me she had never started the Gabapentin. She told me her doctor had no objection to her adding it. I want to say something now that I am going to say several times in this letter, because as a school nurse for twenty-nine years it is the only thing in this letter that I would be willing to be loud about. If you are on metformin, please call your pharmacist before you add anything new. If you are on Gabapentin, or Lyrica, or insulin, or any blood pressure medication, or anything for your cholesterol — please call your pharmacist before you add anything new. The two minutes the call takes are worth every second. I am not, in this letter, a substitute for the woman who has your chart in front of her. I went home that afternoon thinking about Margaret. I went home and I started reading again, but this time I was reading about something specific — about a small internal cycle the body runs called the methylation cycle, and about a specific form of folate that bypasses a problem a lot of people my age have with the ordinary form. The reading made sense to me in a way that the reading I had done a year earlier had not. The first time I had been reading the aisle. This time I was reading the chemistry. I read for three weeks. I called my pharmacist. His name is Ron. I told him what I was thinking about adding. He pulled up my profile. He told me he had no concerns at the dose on the label. He told me to mention it to Dr. Patel at my next appointment, and that he would mention it on his end too. I called Dr. Patel's office. I left a message with her nurse. She called back the next morning and said it was a sensible thing to add at the dose I was considering and to come in for my regular six-month visit and let her know how I was doing. I started in the first week of November. I want to tell you what I noticed and when, and I want to tell you in the order I noticed it, because I think the order matters. The first thing I noticed was the night. For two years I had been getting up at three in the morning to walk the kitchen floor and bring my feet back from whatever they had been doing in the bed. Sometime in the second week of December I went to bed at ten and woke up at five-thirty and realized I had slept through. I did not make a thing of it. I had read enough. The next night I slept the same way. The week after that, the same. The second thing I noticed was an old habit I had stopped doing. I am a reader. Have been for fifty-five years. For most of those fifty-five years I had a book on the kitchen table and another book on the nightstand and I would move between them through the day. For the previous two years I had not been finishing books at the rate I used to. I had been falling asleep in the chair after lunch. I had been re-reading the same page after a nap. The book on the nightstand had been the same book for four months. Sometime in January I finished a book on a Tuesday afternoon and I went down to the library on Wednesday morning and I picked up two more. I have read seven books since January. The third thing I noticed was the walk after breakfast. My husband and I used to walk three quarters of a mile after breakfast, down to the post office and back. We had stopped doing that walk somewhere in the second year of my retirement, and we had not really talked about it, because that is how a thing like that stops with a couple who has been married for forty-one years — you both just stop, and you don't make a conversation out of it. Sometime in February, on a Saturday, my husband finished his coffee and said: are we going to walk? I said: I'd like to. We have walked four mornings a week since then. I want to be honest with you the way I was honest with Dr. Patel. I am not telling you Pre-DX did any of that on its own. I had been pulled, by Margaret's sentence in the senior center, into a stretch of months when I was paying more careful attention to a lot of small things at once. The walks were not all Pre-DX. The books were not all Pre-DX. The sleep was not all Pre-DX. There were several things changing at once. That is how it works when a careful woman finally tells another careful woman the thing she has been carrying quietly for two years. All I am telling you is that I added one small thing to a long list of small things I was newly doing, kept everything else exactly the same, and a stretch of months followed that was qualitatively different from the two years that had preceded it. That is the honest version. I would not give you a cleaner one. I went in for my six-month visit with Dr. Patel last week. She looked at my numbers. They were in the same ranges they had been six months earlier. She asked me how I was doing. I told her. She said: keep doing what you're doing. And she wrote in her note that I had been taking the Pre-DX since November, and that I had been doing well, and that we would talk about it again at my annual. I drove home from her office last week, and what I want you to know is what I was doing in the car. I was thinking about a Wednesday morning in March, with my coffee, getting up to do a walk and the laundry and the dish in the sink and the bird feeder, because three is no longer too many on a Wednesday morning when you are sixty-three. If you are a woman somewhere in your sixties and you have been doing what I had been doing for two years — telling yourself it is just sixty-three, telling yourself it is just retirement, telling yourself it is just the time of year — I want to say one more thing to you carefully. I do not know you. I do not know your chart. Bodies are different. Some women notice something within the first week or two. Some take longer. Some don't notice much at all. Anyone offering you a cleaner version of that is selling you harder than I am. I am a retired school nurse in Iowa. I am not the person to ask about your chart. Your pharmacist or your doctor is. I am asking you, before you add anything, to make the call. The company has a satisfaction guarantee. If you are not satisfied for any reason, they make it right. It is a small-company policy and it is the kind of policy I came up around. That is all I have. Thank you for reading this far. I hope, somewhere today, your own Margaret is sitting next to you in a folding chair at a community room in your own small town. — Carolyn P.S. The form of the vitamins matters. The folate in Pre-DX is pharmaceutical-grade L-methylfolate — already in the form the body can use. The B12 is methylcobalamin, not the cheap form. After twenty-nine years of telling parents that the cheap children's multivitamin in the grocery store was mostly food coloring and sugar, I came to this brand because the form of what is in the capsule actually matches what the body needs. P.P.S. One capsule a day. In the morning. With a glass of water. I keep the bottle next to the coffee maker. Tom has the coffee at six. I take the capsule with my first sip. That is the rhythm of my morning at sixty-three. P.P.P.S. Please call your pharmacist. Especially if you are on metformin. Especially if you are on Gabapentin. Especially if you are on anything for your blood pressure or your cholesterol. They have your whole chart. I have written you a letter. There is a difference. P.P.P.P.S. The sentence Margaret said at the senior center — go read for as long as it takes you to be ready, and call your pharmacist before you do anything — was the kind of sentence one careful woman says to another. It assumed I was capable of doing the work. It did not push me. I have been thinking about that sentence ever since, and about the women, all over the country, sitting next to each other in folding chairs, who have not yet said anything to one another. I hope you have your own Margaret. I hope you say something to her when she asks. I hope you take her advice as carefully as I took mine. I hope, in a year, you are sitting at your own kitchen table on a Wednesday morning, doing three things by noon, and not making a thing of it. I hope that for you.

Where the ad sends people

pre-dx.com

Support healthy nerves and circulation every day

Reverse nerve damage caused by diabetic neuropathy by addressing the cause instead of masking the symptoms. Experience long term relief without the dangerous side effects of hydrocodone, lyrica, neurontin, and cymbalta. Fast results - just one capsule a day with noticeable relief in as little as 60....