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This is one of these places in medicine and surgery and life where what you can’t feel can actually hurt you and even kill you. Now, that sounds kind of scary and I don’t want you to be scared. I just want you to respect this because what happens is, ultimately, in folks with diabetes, most people will lose some degree of sensation and that problem is called neuropathy. It puts people at a great deal of risk for getting a diabetic foot ulcer and then ultimately for getting all the other complications like infections, so called gang green, and an amputation. But upstream, what we we have to understand is that these symptoms may not exist. The key thing for you is to understand that what you can do to fight this is really pretty simple: you can knock your socks off every time you go in to see your doctor. That could be your general doctor or your specialist. When you see him or her, you compel him or her to have a look at your feet and he or she might actually see something or they might not. But what it does is it compels them to get down there to look. So that’s a little tip that I’d give you, but it’s also a part of the key symptom that isn’t even a symptom when we’re talking about diabetes and the foot: what you can’t feel can hurt you.
