Welcome back to the Healing Pain Podcast with Heather Carlyle, PT, DPT, FIPSI

Peripheral neuropathy is the result of damage to the nerves located outside of the brain and the spinal cord. People who have this condition typically suffer from persistent long-term pain as well as other symptoms. There is no shortage of conventional treatments for neuropathy, but these do not address the condition at its root. Over the years, integrative approaches have become more popular in treating both diabetic and chemo-induced neuropathy, and there is a strong evidence base to back their use. Heather Carlyle, PT, DPT, FIPSI, specializes in using integrative and lifestyle medicine in her physical therapy practice. Heather has a passion for helping people improve their quality of life in a natural way. She created Path to Less Nerve Pain, a hybrid online health education program that she developed to treat and reverse neuropathy. In this conversation with Dr. Joe Tatta, Heather discusses the different components of her program. She also talks about the causes of neuropathy, its symptoms, and the various traditional, complementary alternative and integrative medicine approaches that can be used for its treatment.

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An Integrative Approach To Managing Neuropathy With Heather Carlyle, PT, DPT, FIPSI

I’ve taken a couple of weeks off to enjoy the summer fun and sun. I spent time in Florida with my family, enjoyed some of the beaches on Long Island in New York, and spent some time up in the mountains and Connecticut to get away from the heat of the city. I’m excited to be back with you and share ways we can safely and effectively treat many different types of chronic pain conditions. In this episode, we are focusing on neuropathy, also known as peripheral neuropathy, which is the result of damage to nerves often located outside of the brain and the spinal cord. Symptoms of neuropathy often include persistent long-term pain, a sensation of pins and needles, numbness as well as weakness.

One common cause of neuropathy is diabetes, but it can also result from an injury and infection or even exposure to a toxin. Although there are conventional treatments available, these often only mask the symptoms and do not address the root cause of the condition. However, integrative and lifestyle medicine approaches for the treatment of neuropathy are becoming more popular with a strong evidence base to support their use in a wide variety of patients and populations.

Joining us as our expert guest is Dr. Heather Carlyle. She is a physical therapist who specializes in treating neuropathy in both people with diabetic neuropathy as well as those with chemo-induced neuropathy. Dr. Carlyle graduated with her Doctorate degree in Physical Therapy from Emory University in 2007. She has been in practice for many years and has worked with a variety of chronic pain conditions with the aim to restore function, as well as manage and alleviate pain.

Years ago, Heather discovered a passion for helping people live a more natural lifestyle that focused on restoring health and wellness, as well as improving the overall quality of life. This led to the use of natural and integrative approaches to support and provide the body with the tools it needs to heal. She is the Creator of The Path To Less Nerve Pain, which is a hybrid online health education program that she developed a treat and reverse neuropathy.

Dr. Carlyle is also a fellow of the Integrative Pain Science Institute, having completed the Pain Innovative Project, and much of the information she discusses was part of her work in developing her program or her product, which is the Path To Less Nerve Pain. If you are interested in the Pain Innovator Project, becoming a fellow of the Integrative Pain Science Institute, and developing your own protocol or method as Dr. Carlyle did, you can head on over to the IntegrativePainScienceInstitute.com website. Head on over to our Courses and over to the tab look for the Pain Innovator Project or you can send us an email at [email protected].

In this episode, Dr. Carlyle will discuss the different components of the Path To Less Nerve Pain. You also learn what causes neuropathy as well as the various traditional, complementary alternative, and integrative medicine approaches that can be used for its treatment. Without further ado, let’s begin and learn about the Path To Less Nerve Pain and how to reverse peripheral neuropathy with Dr. Heather Carlyle.

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Heather, thanks for joining us. It’s great to have you here.

Thanks. It’s great to be here.

I’m excited to chat with you. Obviously, you are a physical therapist. You have your own private practice in Georgia and started to build out this interesting niche in your private practice. I have found a few physical therapists who have started to niche into this topic, as well as seeing the general, neurologic and musculoskeletal pain that all of us see. You’ve started to niche into neuropathy and neuropathic pain, which is such an important component of looking at people with pain. We hear these numbers all the time. It was 100 million people who struggled with chronic pain but within that 100 million people, there is a population of people who have fibromyalgia, chronic low back pain, and neuropathy. How did you decide to focus on this niche in your practice in particular?

It was a natural career progression. I spent the early part of my career in orthopedics and neuro inpatient rehab, where I was working with a lot of different patients that were struggling in that chronic pain world. You become intrigued as to why some patients develop chronic pain and neuropathy, and others don’t, within that subset that was trying to figure out why it’s difficult to treat. They don’t respond well a lot of times to more traditional methods. I could see their frustration. They felt like they didn’t have a lot of support and options. I felt my own frustration as a clinician because they didn’t respond to a lot of the more traditional treatments that we typically use.

I knew there had to be a better way that we could help them. You talked to that big group of chronic pain, and within neuropathy, there are 20 million of that 100 million that are adults struggling with some of the neuropathic pain. You realize how many people need that support. I had a personal factor. My own dad is a Type 2 diabetic and has been for a long time.

Around this time is when he started to get that neuropathy that comes from having diabetes. I saw his personal struggle, not having a lot of options, and not responding well to the medications. I saw how it affected him mentally and emotionally when it attacked a disability to participate with his kids and grandkids, to go out and do his job.

I knew there had to be a missing piece. There had to be something we were missing in that bigger treatment puzzle that wasn’t happening for these patients. That’s when I started doing some deeper dives. I started studying and learning to understand our neuropathy and what causes it. I realized that there were some integrative pieces I was missing.

I have dove down into learning more about supplements and essential oils, took the Functional Nutrition for Pain course that you offer, and looking for a way to tie all of this together so that it would make sense for the patients and the clients that I work with. It would be simple enough for them to implement and still be able to have that bigger impact on how they feel.

We tend to address the physical symptoms of neuropathy, but very little is being done to address its mental, emotional, and psychosocial effects and how it's impacting how patients view their quality of life. Share on X

It’s interesting because as you are talking, I’m thinking back to my early career where I worked in an inpatient adult rehabilitation setting. I saw patients with neuropathy as every PT does, it sounds like you did as well but we see them almost toward the end of their journey where there are already so many significant impairments present that it’s very difficult to address everything that’s happening at that point.

What you are saying is you start to look upstream and, “I’m seeing this in my patients and family member. What are we all missing? How do I start to address this early on before we have people that are impacted with disability physically, as well as emotionally?” Talk to that impact a little bit more about how neuropathy impacts one’s quality of life and function.

Normally, as physical therapists, we aren’t seeing these patients until they are finally telling their doctor they can’t do this anymore. They are getting to that desperate point where it’s incredible for their quality of life. The diagnosis of peripheral neuropathy has a profound impact on the quality of life of patients. Neuropathy is different for everybody.

In some people, it’s more feet, more hands or there are different areas that get impacted. What we see as a profession is that we are looking at, “How does it affect fine motor skills?” Doing simple things like being able to button up a shirt, hold a pen and write or doing a meal and food prep can be a huge one. On that gross motor, bigger muscle realm, we see things like it’s impairing their ability to stand for any length of time and their ability to walk any length of distance.

Sometimes, because of neuropathy, it impairs that sensory input and balance. We’ve got an increased risk of falls, which of course, can lead to other injuries. What all those things combined do is impact how they are able to perform their work duties. It impacts how they can perform at home doing their support ADLs and self-care. As a PT, that’s a lot of what we look at but what we also see long-term is that these patients end up having mental and emotional psychosocial impacts as well. It leads to feeling frustrated. They end up feeling very helpless.

For a lot of patients, the chronic pain role and neuropathies are no different. They end up also having chronic anxiety and depression. They end up feeling very isolated because, as this progression happens with enteropathy, many of them lose their ability to drive or are not comfortable driving. They feel very dependent on other people. They can’t get out with family and friends and do the activities and the things that they enjoy doing. They collapse inward. The world collapses. The quality of life goes down. We tend to address those physical things, the fine motor, gross motor, and balance but very little is being done to address these psychosocial impacts, the emotional, the mental, and how it’s impacting how they view their quality of life.

That driving piece was impactful for me because I had this image of obviously someone who has potentially neuropathy in their hands and feet. When you have neuropathy in your hands and feet, your sensation is diminished, so you can’t feel the steering wheel in your hands. You can’t feel the accelerator or the brake pedal. There is a physical limitation or impairment that’s there. Also, when we think of driving, in many ways, it takes away someone’s independence.

That’s our freedom, especially in America because we don’t have the transit systems you see in other countries. In working with geriatric populations or anything like that, the hardest thing to do is take someone’s keys. They lose that ability to drive, and that’s such an impact on our independence. It does something to your whole outlook. If they do drive, then they are at an increased risk of getting into an accident or causing injury.

 

We live, so it spread out now. We don’t always have close family nearby. A lot of these patients need to get to doctor’s appointments. They need to be able to get to pick up prescriptions and groceries. All of a sudden, they don’t have somebody who can drive them or they don’t like asking someone to have to drive them. They end up in a very difficult position where they can’t get what they need to sometimes.

You mentioned a link between diabetes and neuropathy. You can talk about that for a moment but there are also other causes of neuropathy that I know you treat, which are important for us to share with our community as well.

Neuropathy is a broad term. We see neuropathy within diagnoses. Diagnoses, conditions, and symptoms, even within that symptoms, can be very variable. It’s very hard sometimes when you are talking to people about neuropathy because you are going to have patients coming to you with neuropathy that has intense pain and hypersensitivity. You may have some that are coming in that can’t feel their hands and feet at all or they are numb and tingly.

There’s this broad spectrum of everything in between, burning and shooting pains. You hear the gamut. While diabetes mellitus is probably one of the most well-known and major causes of neuropathy, we are seeing it more in cancer survivors. After people go through their chemo and radiation treatments, several of the different drugs that they use are well-known for causing neuropathy.

I’m seeing more of these chemo-induced peripheral neuropathy patients as well. The underlying thing here is that there can also be toxin exposure like there’s in chemo. It can be very inflammatory in nature. There are genetic pieces to it. There are multiple things that can go in and cause somebody to develop neuropathy-type symptoms. What I’ve found is this underlying theme, whether it’s an injury that we see in CRPS.

It was sometimes a minor injury that flares into this major neurological presentation but there seems to be this underlying root cause of inflammation in a lot of these clients, whether it was an injury or compression of the nerve, whether it’s because there’s for blood sugar regulation or poor circulation to the area. It may have been a toxin exposure. All of these things have this inflammatory base.

A lot of times, when I’m talking to people, they think inflammation is redness, swelling, and pain like what we see when you sprain an ankle or get an injury. What is inflammation? That’s that immediate response. That chronic inflammation can look different. It can affect the whole body and multiple systems. That nerve system is one of the systems that get impacted the way that it tells us that it’s being hurt by this inflammation as these neuropathy symptoms.

We have to factor in what plays into inflammation like, “Is there nutrition? Is it gut health? Is it our quality of sleep? Is it our ability to be mindful and manage stress? Is it the exercise either sometimes too much or too little?” Inflammation is very multifactorial, which makes neuropathy very multifactorial. There are a lot of things beyond what we think of diabetes where they need to regulate blood sugar. It’s so much more than just having good blood sugar control.

When you combine things like self-management, self-education and lifestyle modifications, it puts the power back in the hands of the patient to make better choices. Share on X

From the diabetic side, there’s an inflammatory component. They are obviously, related to diet and lifestyle. From the chemo-induced side, the drugs that are lifesaving for people sometimes have negative side effects that can cause injury and inflammation to the nervous system.

They are toxins to the cells that we want to eradicate but that doesn’t mean that they are not toxic to the cells that we want to remain. That toxicity also creates an inflammatory response in the body. Your body is trying to figure out what to do with it. It’s trying to heal and recover from this toxic glass at the body received usually. There’s both.

You started treating patients, doing your own research in this area, and looking at the evidence behind integrative strategies or approaches to treating neuropathy. How have you now built this into your own program, and what does that program look like?

To understand integrative, you have to understand traditional a little bit. When it comes to treating neuropathy, the more traditional means to do this have been mostly medication. A lot of physicians, that’s the first thing they turn to. When that patient comes in and is complaining of neuropathy symptoms, it could be pain medication. It’s the neurological medications like your Gabapentins and things like that as well.

Sometimes, they are using anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medications that a lot of physicians don’t even turn to physical therapy right out of the gate. As we talked about, by the time they get to physical therapy, it’s because other things have failed a lot of times. We had this traditional model of medications first then if that didn’t work, we moved into physical therapy.

The traditional way in physical therapy that we treat it is through our modalities, ice, heat or tense. We use a lot of balance retraining, strengthening, stretching, and manual techniques. The problem with that was that our patients are still lacking access to that more integrative type of approach, the nutrition and lifestyle modification interventions. There’s a lot of research coming out.

They’ve done a huge amount of research, especially with the diabetic population, that shows the benefits of lifestyle modification. When I was doing this research, there’s even some research coming out now with the post-cancer treatment patient for lifestyle modification. What they are showing is that when you combine things like self-management, self-education, and these lifestyle modifications, it starts to put the power back in the hands of the patient to make better choices and make these shifts.

With that comes that more patient-centered approach, which is what we are all taught to do, to how we treat. It puts the patient in a more empowered and active role in the decision-making process. That ultimately can increase the quality of life. Before we’ve even really touched on symptoms, they feel more empowered and in control.

 

What I started looking at doing is taking that research and understanding the different components, and creating a more integrative approach to how I’m treating neuropathy. I can still bring in that conventional physical therapy approach where we still work on strength, balance, and desensitization or depending on what the patient’s needs are. I wanted to go to reach beyond where I am in Georgia.

I created an online platform. It is about that education and self-management piece. It’s this integrative approach where I break it down so that we are addressing nutrition. We are talking about the importance of blood sugar, regulation, and hydration. We are able to address mindfulness and stress management techniques and work on sleep hygiene routines that will improve overall sleep. I took that traditional PT with those integrative approaches.

We include educational supplements and essential oils as well since I have that background. We work on having the patient take control of that education and those healthy habits to make them more sustainable. We also added in some one-on-one coaching, accountability, and a peer support group because everyone needs to feel like they are not isolated and alone in this journey. It always amazes me in the peer support group how much they can help each other, even problem solve as a group through obstacles and things that someone might be struggling with.

What it does is this combination allows patients to improve their outcomes or quality of life. It allows for more effective self-management and long-term shifts. It’s not just an immediate twelve weeks. This goes way beyond to now the choices that they are making the lifestyle habits. It’s also benefiting their overall health and wellness, not just improving the neuropathy symptoms.

What you created was an integrative physical therapy approach to treating neuropathy. Obviously, you have a practice so people can come into your clinic and see you one-on-one. Many people with chronic pain syndrome, especially in your apathy, are somewhat isolated at home. The online component bridges that gap where if you can only see someone let’s say, once in the clinic, in the online component, you can reach people from a further distance.

With that online component, they have the information and knowledge in front of them, so they can learn on their own as they are going through the program. The peer support part is interesting and important because people feel like, “I have this condition. I haven’t been able to find a solution for it, and no one has been able to help me, then I start to feel alone.” Many people are alone at home.

We are tying that there tends to be more isolated. A lot of people do not know other people are going through it. There’s always something in peer support when you can be in a group where other people are going through it with you. You can have that support. You are going to have good days and bad days. You’ve got people to reach out to when you are struggling, and they are going to be encouraging and lifting. We are not meant to live in isolation. As human beings, we don’t thrive well when we don’t have a community. This is one more way to give them that community. It also allows them to go back over and over because these are things that sometimes they need to hear more than once.

I don’t have to repeat it over again. This is something that’s at their fingertips, then I get to focus more on working them through their different levels of making change. They’ve got the education, and that allows my time to be spent on helping them make your obstacles, “Let’s overcome blocks. Let’s customize. Let’s make this something that’s very doable for them, so they have that base of education, then that coaching and support come in so that they can make real progress and know how to implement that education and know how to move forward when I get stuck.” Everyone is going to get stuck at some point.

We are not meant to live in isolation. As human beings, we don't thrive well when we don't have a community. Share on X

I know you were obviously working with patients actively. Can you give us a case study or patient example of someone you’ve treated? What were they like when they came into the program and when they completed the program?

I’m excited about the results that I have been seeing. I have one client who gave me permission to use her treatment as a case study, which was super exciting. She has completed the online piece of the program and the coaching. She’s still in the group. As a female who has undergone cancer treatments twice, she was diagnosed with her first round of cancer back in 2017 or 2018, went through cancer treatments, developed neuropathy with that chemo and radiation, and then had a second round of cancer. Unfortunately, that came and was diagnosed in 2021. She’s gone through now breast cancer treatment and all the chemo and radiation associated with that. It took the neuropathy that was already there. It exploded and got worse.

She found me through another colleague who had heard what I was working on. We decided she was a good fit for the program. She came into the program, and it was primarily her feet. In chemo-induced neuropathy, we see the feet being the most effective but she also had some in her fingertips. She was at about an 8 or 9 out of 10 pain pretty consistently. She is very hyper-sensitive. She couldn’t wear socks.

She didn’t like the sheets touching our feet but still had to have something on her feet. She could not walk across the floor barefoot.

She couldn’t stand that input coming from the feet. She had stopped driving. She didn’t feel comfortable driving. She was feeling very isolated. She does have family, at least in the area but has gone from being very active. She’s gone through the chemo, which takes a lot out of neuropathy aside. She’s still recovering in so many ways after that. To have this pain, it was waking her up at night. She wasn’t sleeping, and we all know when you don’t sleep well, your ability to manage stress and stay healthy is impaired.

She was super excited. She came into the program. She has done amazing in the program and has been very on top of it, dedicated, and committed. About halfway through our program, around that 5 or 6-week mark, we had one of our calls. We had already taken her pain down from 9 to about 4 or 5. Within that short time, she already saw improvement. When she finished the course, we had her pain down to about three pain-wise. She still had some tingling, numbness, and things like that going on but the pain was so much better that she was starting to be more active again and sleep better.

Right out of the gate, she said how much her energy was improving, and then she called me. She had a follow-up with one of her physicians toward the end of the program. The doctor looked at her and said, “I don’t know what you are doing but your lab work looks incredible. Keep doing it.” It was very comprehensive that everything all ships rise. If you start focusing on health, everything improves. She is in my clinic. We do an in-house Calmare Scrambler treatment with a lot of my neuropathy clients. She had finished all the online stuff. We are running through that treatment protocol.

She had a significant decrease in the tingling because she came in and there was no pain. She’s like, “I still had that tingly numbness feeling.” It’s not bad. She could feel our feet but it was there. Even on the first day, we saw a reduction. She’s super excited, especially since cancer starts with stage one, put this behind them. They want to be able to move through, pass, and not be reminded of everything that they went through. I’m excited. I’m going to hopefully be submitting her case study for publication once we finish everything because it was such a great example of how that integrative approach can not only help neuropathy but health and wellness in general.

 

Her pain significantly decreased, which is always nice. Patients always would like that, and we would like that too. You mentioned changes in biomarkers, which are interesting, and I hope you track those. It’s always nice to see that as someone’s pain is changing, biomarkers are changing, and physical function is changing.

The blood pressure is better. Everything is looking a little more where we want it to be.

When the physician says, “I don’t know what you are doing but keep doing it,” you know that you’ve touched on something special because often they are seeing these patients that are taking the medication, maybe doing some traditional stuff and what happens is there’s a plateau. Nothing changes but a lot of the solutions that you are working on, these integrative strategies take it a step further.

Since this is not happening in traditional medicine, you always hear, “I don’t know what you are doing but keep doing it.” We always say, “Let me tell you what we are doing. I have this program.” You haven’t told us the name of the program. You should tell our community and the readers the name of the program.

The name of the program is very simple. It is The Path To Less Nerve Pain. I did it that way because we know it’s not t the magic wand or pill because it is a journey for these patients and clients that I work with. I tell them all the time, “Success is not linear. I don’t expect every day to be ten times better than the day before. It’s still going to have ups and downs in the process.” Especially if you have been working with clients with neuropathy for years or have neuropathy due to something like diabetes where the damage was done well before the neuropathy started, most people, by the time the neuropathy starts, have been diabetic for several years, and the damage has accumulated.

I’m like, “It didn’t happen overnight. It’s not going to go away overnight but you are going to make steady progress in the right direction.” It is a path and a journey. It’s Path To Less Nerve Pain is the program. The clinic that I have here in Georgia is Healing Essentials Physical Therapy. They are cohesive and go hand in hand. The program is done through the clinic.

I have been following you on Instagram and watching you grow this platform. You said something which is important for people to know because many people have been struggling with neuropathy for a long time and they feel like, “I’ve had this for so long that this is never going to change.” You said online, “Nerves do you have the ability to regenerate.” There’s this myth out there that once a nerve is damaged, that’s it. You can’t do anything for it but that’s not where you are finding in your work and not what the research says either.

There are cases where if someone has a complete spinal injury or severed, then that is its own separate thing. When we are just talking about generalized neuropathy, nerves are slow to heal. I tell my clients all the time that they are probably one of the slowest in the body to heal but that doesn’t mean that they can’t. We have to be able to provide the environment and tools that they need to start that healing and regeneration process. A lot of this is because people can get impatient sometimes. It doesn’t happen quick enough or fast enough. They are quick to abandon ship. It’s that consistency over time where you are making those small changes and sticking with it that seems to have the biggest impact on the nervous system.

The healing process for neuropathy is directly related to how long you've had it. The longer you've had it, the longer it's going to take to recover. Share on X

It’s not just our diet. Obviously, what we eat can cause more or less inflammation. We focus a lot on what we can put our body that’s good. I like people to have a healthy relationship with food. I don’t like to focus on what they have to give up because that creates that instant. I call it the toddler reflex, where as soon as you tell yourself you can’t do or have something, that’s all you think about and want to do. You are going to dig your heels in. I’m like, “Let’s focus on what you can do. Let’s focus on all the great foods you can add that is going to be healing.”

It’s funny because the client that I was referring to this in the case study and even some of the others, once you start to feel better and associate certain foods with making you feel worse, you immediately don’t want to feel worse. It’s easier to make those shifts. It is that initial couple of steps that tend to be hard. The nerves need very specific nutrients to heal. They are largely fat based. They need healthy fats, healthy proteins, and omegas.

That’s where sometimes the disconnect can come in because people think to eat healthily, they have to eat low fat and low carb. Our nerves use glucose as a fuel source. It has to be coming from a good source. When we completely cut out fats and carbs, we are starving and depriving our nerves of what they need to heal, rebuild, and improve themselves.

There’s also the brain and body connection that it’s how we think, focus, and manage stress because our nervous system responds to all of that. It’s going to respond to stress and lack of sleep. If you can’t sleep, it’s very hard to heal. If you are super stressed or keeping that nervous system rubbed up with all the cortisol and it’s hard to let it down-regulate out of that super sensitive over-reactive mode, which is what we ultimately want to do for most of our clients.

The nutrition part is so important because you mentioned we have looked at fats as they are unhealthy. Take them out of your diet. You shouldn’t have fat in your diet. Our nervous system is about 60% fat. If you want to provide your nervous system with an anti-inflammatory impact and nourish those nerves so that they grow, heal, and regenerate, fats are essential. The Omega-3 fats are probably some of the most important ones that we should point our patients towards.

Like I said, the healthy carbs. Carbs are not the enemy either. They need a certain level of glucose to function too. That’s their main energy source. We don’t want unstable blood sugar. We don’t want those big spikes and drops but we do want to provide them with what they need to function. Hydration is key because we can’t flush out toxins. We can’t remove waste around those cells.

This isn’t my analogy but I heard a colleague that said, “You wouldn’t want to just sit in dirty bath water. When we don’t hydrate and don’t allow our body to flush toxins, you have yourself sitting in your own waste.” I’m like, “That’s not healthy for anybody.” It’s definitely not healthy for the nerve cells. We want to be able to clear the waste and move things through so that they constantly have healthy fluids around them that they are able to get rid of the waste and metabolize it appropriately.

If there are people reading, so maybe there is someone with diabetes who’s had neuropathy for a long time or who is finishing up their chemotherapy treatment, noticing that there have been changes now in their feet, and are having problems walking and balance but no one has told them about these options, what is your advice to them?

 

Be proactive. The sooner you can get in, make shifts, and address it, the quicker and better the nerves are going to respond. I always tell people, “The healing process is directly related to how long you’ve had it. The longer you’ve had it, the longer it’s taken the recover.” Don’t just immediately accept that status quo of, “There’s nothing you can do. You are going to have to live with it. This is your new normal.” I hear that all the time. Listen to your body and if you can find an integrative practitioner that you can work with that is going to help you work through the different nutrition and lifestyle shifts, that would be beneficial for you and combine that alongside those more what we consider traditional interventions, that’s amazing.

The simple things like we talked about. Make sure you are getting enough fluids and hydrating unless you’ve got a medical reason why you can’t consume the appropriate amount of water. Getting enough water, make some simple shifts in your nutrition for those healthy fats, and stay away from processed. That’s a big thing, whether you are diabetic or a cancer survivor, processed sugar is super inflammatory. In my program, they get the biggest or quickest wins of feeling better when they increase their water and get that sugar out of their diet. It’s such an immediate like the body just wants it out. Stay away from that processed sugar, substitute it for some of those healthier options, lots of veggies, and things like that.

It has been great speaking with you, Heather, about an integrative approach to managing neuropathy, both for people with diabetes, CRPS, and chemo-induced neuropathy, the three important populations of people with chronic pain that are looking for solutions. Let everyone know how they can learn more about you and the work that you are doing.

HealingEssentialsPT.com is my website. I’m on Facebook and Instagram, @Healing_Essentials_PT. I have a community group. It’s an open community group. It’s the A Holistic Approach to Nerve Pain and Neuropathy. You can find it through the Facebook page as well. It’s just a great resource for people coming in and wanting to learn more. That community group is a great place for people to start. I’m in the North Georgia area. I have a clinic as well.

It has been great speaking with all of you and sharing this time with you. Make sure to share this episode with your friends and family on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. You can tag both Heather and me on Instagram. You can find us at @DrJoeTatta, and we’ll be sure to tag you back. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure to tune in next episode. We will cover another topic on how to heal chronic pain. Take care.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Heather Carlyle
• The Path To Less Nerve Pain
• Pain Innovator Project
• [email protected]
• Functional Nutrition for Pain
• Calmare Scrambler
• Facebook – Healing Essentials PT
• @Healing_Essentials_PT – Instagram
• A Holistic Approach to Nerve Pain and Neuropathy – Facebook group
• @DrJoeTatta – Instagram

 

About Dr. Heather Carlyle

Dr. Heather Carlyle graduated with her Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Emory University in 2007. She has been in practice for over 15 years and has worked with a variety of patients in different settings to restore function and decrease pain. About 7 years ago Heather discovered a passion for helping people live a more natural lifestyle that focused on restoring health and wellness and improving overall quality of life. This lead to a passion for the use of essential oils and natural remedies to support and provide the body with the tools it needs to heal itself. Now as an experienced PT, Certified Clinical Aromatherapist and specializing in Functional Nutrition for Pain, Heather is excited to bring a more holistic and integrative approach to pain treatment and restoring wellness for all those who wish to live a more active and healthier lifestyle. She is the Founder of The Path to Less Nerve Pain which is an online program and also offers in-person options at her restorative wellness center at the foot of the North Georgia Mountains.