Are my pills causing my hands and feet to throb? DR MARTIN SCURR answers your health questions –

I’ve had burning, throbbing feet and hands for two years, but none of my doctors have had an answer. What could be the reason?

Margaret Saxby, by e-mail.

The burning sensation that affects the feet is usually caused by nerve damage in the legs known as peripheral neuropathy. Sometimes this condition can also affect the hands and arms.

Because high blood sugar can cause nerve damage, it has many possible causes, although it is often a complication of type 2 diabetes.

Excessive alcohol consumption, exposure to toxins, and a lack of B vitamins can also cause nerve damage.

But since you’ve been feeling these feelings for so long, I’m assuming your doctor has ruled them out.

My suggestion is that it could be due to the drugs you mentioned in your longest letter, especially the high blood pressure pills.

While ramipril, one of the medications you are taking, is actually given to improve the symptoms of neuropathy in diabetic patients (it is believed to help reduce inflammation), one of the other pills, hydralazine, can cause numbness, tingling and tingling in some people. causes redness in patients. people – even if why is a mystery. However, this rarely happens in people like you who take the 25mg dose, and more often in people who take the 400mg.

However, while it is not a reason to stop treatment, it may be the cause of your symptoms.

Doxazosin, one of the blood pressure treatments, can also cause burning, itching, numbness and tingling sensations in the extremities. Again, this is a rare side effect.

In my opinion, there is a chance that your symptoms may be due to one of these drugs, or perhaps a combination of both. It may be helpful to discuss this with your doctor and also to check if you have been screened for type 2 diabetes and vitamin B12 deficiency. Hope this helps.

I suffered from seven mouth ulcers at once. They started right after I shot my second Pfizer in April last year. I can’t see any other reason for these mouth ulcers other than jab. I refused the booster.

Miss D Betts, Bognor Regis.

I understand the temptation to associate your Covid vaccines with subsequent canker sores, but there is no conclusive evidence of such a link.

There were a handful of individual stories about it published as one-off case studies in medical journals, including one from May 2021 of a 34-year-old woman who developed a mouth ulcer two days after her first Pfizer vaccine.

The difficulty lies in the need to distinguish beyond any doubt between chance and evidence.

Sores in the mouth can be acutely painful, but usually heal within a week or two.

Some people have sores that recur so often that they are almost continuous, and you seem to belong in this category. Medically, this is known as recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS).

The exact cause of RAS is unknown, but it is often familiar and suggests a genetic link.

I understand the temptation to link your Covid vaccines to the thrush that follows, but there is no conclusive evidence of such a link.

Trauma (for example, damage caused by using a toothbrush), hormonal changes (both during menstruation and menopause), and stress are possible triggers for mouth ulcers.

Mouth ulcers are also a symptom of conditions such as celiac disease (an autoimmune disease caused by a reaction to gluten, wheat protein) and inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. These conditions are immune system disorders and we cannot say whether the immune manipulation with Covid vaccines is also a trigger.

However, when I asked experts in this field, no one saw a clear link between vaccines and stomach ulcers.

I urge you to reconsider your refusal to recall, as aphthae are unpleasant but still preferable to Covid.

write to scer

Write to Dr Scurr at Good Health, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email drmartin@dailymail.co.uk – include your contact details. Dr. Scurr cannot access personal communications. Answers should be taken in a general context and always consult your doctor if you have any health concerns.

I think: compassionate care is gone

I would like to consider my medical career to be based on providing compassionate, individual, and patient-centered care.

But would I take the same care if I had to do my medical studies now? I say this in response to further disclosures about the true state of health care in the maternity services review at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust.

I find it hard to understand the mix of deficiencies and inadequacies that have led to the deaths of more than 200 children and nine mothers out there.

In the 1970s I spent a year as a midwife’s assistant – three counselors a day.

Every woman who gave birth had a midwife. The discipline was so severe that failing to record blood loss with a red pen in the patient record could result in reprimand.

What changed? A lot, but in reality it can be summed up in one word: management.

The triumph of management – ​​doctors, nurses and midwives just cogs in a bigger machine – has replaced compassion with tics and indifference, and our NHS is far worse for that.