Does mild/early alcohol neuropathy require 100% alcohol cessation?

I guess the answer is YES but I still wonder. There are some social occasions where it feels really un-natural.

I had never heard of alcoholic neuropathy ’till i got tingling in my right hand pinky and ring finger. Google told me it was occupational (ulnar nerve damage) and would likely require surgery. The surgeon told me to see first a neurologist when I told her I was having 4 beers a day. The MRI clearly shows ulnar nerve compression, btw.

The neurologist further questioned my drinking habits upon discovering asymptomatic neuropathy (not just ulnar nerve tunnel syndrome) in my other hand and both my feet. The whole time, while conducting nerve conduction study, he was expressing a great amount of surprise at how serious it was. He told me the neuropathy was the main thing to worry about, not the ulnar nerve damage. He actually never uttered the phrase “alcoholic neuropathy” incidentally. I guess he just let me put 2 and 2 together.

Actually, I was drinking way more than 4 beers per day and I did tell the neurologist. It was actually 4 tall boys at a minimum every day, plus two for lunch on most days and quite a bit more on weekends. This amount was during the last 2 years before neuropathy (helped by a years-long COVID-enforced family separation due to border closures). For the previous 40 years, I was drinking less, but still over the recommended amount. I do come from a family where excessive alcohol consumption is probably half a millennium long (no, we don’t learn from our mistakes) going back up in the generations. (To be fair, I also do one 36-hour water fast every Monday to give my body a chance to recover from the weekend’s excess).

The neurologist eventually didn’t diagnose me with alcoholic neuropathy but told me to “drink less.” That was after I did the blood works and a full body cancer scan. He said to stick to one small beer per day tops. Well, I’ve been doing that more or less, drinking under the recommended limit for the past 3 months. I’m at about 6-12 small beers (330ml) per week now, or calculated different, 10-30% of my previous quantity. Several weeks, I’ve spent completely dry. So my average for the past 3 months is yes, about one small beer a day topping at 4 on a single day.

I’m also doing pilates, yoga, swimming, running, gym…. I’m taking all the supplements I read about (pharma grade Bs, alfa lipoic, brewers years, carnitine, green tea, multivits, garlic, fish oil, glucosamine). I eat a lot more since I learned about alcoholic neuropathy. I’m 60 btw and in very good shape except from my compromised nervous system. Since cutting down drinking, I sleep way better and do more exercise.

So far, after 3 months of very moderate drinking, I can mostly observe that it’s not getting worse. I had been starting to feel some tingling in both my wrists, but it’s not happening anymore. Occasional sharp pains in my feet stopped as soon as I cut drinking down. But do I need to completely stop alcohol 100% to stop my hands tingling? There’s some stuff online about “lifetime alcohol limit.” Does that exist? If it does, it means that 100% is the only way forward.

One weird thing is that so far, I have had no constant tingling in my feet, unlike in my hands. Sometimes, I wonder if I don’t just have ulnar nerve damage in my right hand and carpal in the other (I type a LOT!) and the neuropathy is mis-diagnosis (and this line of thinking makes me think it’s my alcoholic brain looking for a way back to “normal.”)

I know people say “don’t get medical advice from Reddit”, but this community has told me more than regular doctors so far. And I do really want to THANK those of you who have posted about this topic.

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