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This year I started experiencing atypical trigeminal neuralgia. Since I've lost around 115lbs, it seems doctors are rather tempted to believe it may be due to nutritional deficiency. I don't think so- paleo foods are more nutritionally dense and bio-available.

But here I am on gabapentin and a multi-vitamin(yeah, I know they are useless) wondering what the correct approach would be. I held off as long as I could because I really didn't want drugs at all, but pain is a powerful motivator.

In the past I just avoided doctors, but since it seems I am now forced by this pain to deal with them, I could use a few pointers on how to deal with them and how to minimize the damage.

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4 Answers

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I would look for a naturopath - they are less likely to start with pharma solutions and look at your history and path to where you are. While mine isn't paleo, she is a huge advocate of gluten free and eating as close to the source as possible, which really helps. she is also into alternative therapies (massage, acupuncture, etc.) and will recommend based on her experiences & network. I haven't found many (just one) MD's who would start without instantly prescribing medications.

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use Google and search in your area using the following terms:

integrative medicine holistic medicine naturpathy (as CC mentioned already)

I am in NYC so i create Google searches using NYC as one of the keywords.

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Find someone who wants to work with you. You have to do your part with tracking and the like, but I have found doctors who look at this as a partnership. There don't seem to be big studies, but there have been smaller studies on paleo, you might consider printing them out and bringing them.

It sounds bad to put it this way, but look for a health care person whom others complain about expecting too much from them in terms of behavior change. I know these doctors usually advocate SAD but someone who believes in the power of lifestyle instead of pill and bill is probably going to be a much better fit overall.

It must be really frustrating to have everyone telling you to lose weight to be healthy and then when you do find a way to lose weight that since you lost weight you must not be healthy.

I would also consider acupuncture because it is my go-to for certain kinds of pain, but I am super twichy about pain med because of a bad family history.

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Track your diet and find out which, if any nutrients you are actually potentially lacking in. And either eat more foods that have those nutrients to make up the difference, or research the highest quality supplements for those nutrients only and take only those. Do not waste your time on a multi full of mostly vitamins you don't need at all but with potentially little of the few vitamins you may need. If your doctor complains, you can show them your diet breakdown showing how much vitamin you already get daily. IMO, multi vitamins are only good for people with fairly poor diets and even they would probably do better with a more targeted and scientific approach.

Unfortunately, looks like docs are fairly clueless about what actually causes this disease though. But I do see some people have gotten rid of it via going gluten free, which would definitely be worth a shot. Might be autoimmune related and gluten seems to just cause problems all around anyway.

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I'm pretty strict on avoiding gluten now. So far, I'm having a tough time coming up with a possible culprit in terms of any nutrient lack. Perhaps I can get somewhere by looking for deficiencies with an association to neuralgias. When I've looked in the past, I've usually found I was getting enough. I supplement with magnesium, selenium, d3, and I buy seaweed for iodine. The multi-vitamins seem highly unecessary. – August Nov 24 2010 at 2:01

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