How A 68-Year-Old In Oregon Found Out Why 6 Nerve Creams All Stopped Working By Bedtime

“5 of the 6 were built on one working ingredient. The one that wasn’t is the only jar I’ve bought twice.”

Frank D., 68 · Oregon  /  July 2, 2026

The burning in my feet starts around 10 at night.

By 3 in the morning I’m not thinking about anything else.

There’s a drawer in my kitchen, second one down, where the batteries and the twist ties go.

6 creams are in there too.

They cost me $214 over about 14 months, and I know the number because I kept the receipts in the drawer along with them, on the theory that having them there would stop me buying the same thing twice.

All of them worked at first.

I’d rub it in, my feet would go cold, and for half an hour I’d think I had it.

Then I’d get into bed and the cold would thin out and the burning would come back up underneath it.

By the sixth one I wasn’t expecting much, and I bought it anyway.

I bought 6 creams and only one of them was still doing anything at midnight.

I had the nerve test the year I turned 65.

Peripheral neuropathy is what they called it.

I’m in bed by 10:30.

It takes about 40 minutes for the burning to get going, and then I’m up twice, once around 1 and again closer to 3:20.

I go into the bathroom and run the cold tap over both feet in the tub, holding the towel rail.

That buys me 20 minutes and then it comes back.

My feet are no good to me for the first hour of the morning.

What I miss is the Thursday golf, 9 holes walking with the same 3 men since 1998.

The freezing rubs, the blue ones, those were the first thing I bought. Here’s the rest of it.

• A freezing rub from the drugstore, and then a second bottle of it because I decided the first was old stock
• A pharmacy brand at nearly 3 times the price
• Magnesium lotion, ordered off Amazon
• Another magnesium lotion, different company, same idea
• A roll-on, because I thought the applicator was the problem
• A tub with a long name on it that turned out to be the freezing rub again

The 2 magnesium ones were the same mineral doing the same job, twice, at different prices.

The pharmacy one was the best of them.

It got me to an hour on a good night, and nothing else in 14 months did.

I bought it twice more at close to $40 a jar.

The neurologist was decent about it and never told me to stop trying things.

His office was in a building that used to be a bank, and the elevator had a brass plate in it with a 1961 inspection date.

Anyway, after the sixth one I sat down at this table on a Sunday with all 6 of them and my glasses.

While I was at it I wrote on the back of an envelope what I wanted out of the next one.

Something that told me what the working parts were, in plain words.

It had to still be doing something at 2 in the morning, which was the main one.

And I wanted to be able to send it back if it didn’t.

Underneath I’d put ‘not only menthol’ and underlined it.

I read the backs of all 6, and most of them said the same thing.

On 5 of them the working part was one ingredient.

It was menthol, or magnesium, and then the things that make a cream a cream: water, an oil, a thickener, a preservative, something for the smell.

One had menthol listed first and 11 more things under it, and none of the 11 was doing anything to a nerve.

One of them was built differently.

It had 2 things in it doing work rather than making the cream. That explained the hour.

I wanted the next one to have more than 2 in it.

I found one on the computer that night and ordered it on a Tuesday. It might have been Wednesday.

The jar said Lune.

I looked them up while it was coming, on the computer in the spare room.

Doctors’ names on the site, neurology and pain specialists, and a write-up in Men’s Health.

It’s a heavy little jar, that one, glass, heavier than it needs to be.

It sat on the counter by the bread box for 2 days.

I opened it on a Thursday, past midnight, because I was up anyway.

The first 20 minutes went the way they always went.

Then it kept going, which it hadn’t before.

I slept until 6 in the morning.

It had been a long day too, and I had been out in the yard most of it.

By the fourth night I’d started writing down what time I woke up.

The sixth one had a different kind of list.

Frankincense was the first thing on it.

I’d only ever heard that word at Christmas.

Then there was arnica, which my mother kept in the cabinet for bruises.

Willow bark was on there too, and that’s where aspirin started out, or near enough.

Frankincense · Arnica · Cayenne · Hemp seed oil

Magnesium chloride · Menthol · Peppermint · Camphor · Calendula · Witch hazel · MSM · Willow bark · Glucosamine · Algal omega‑3 · Niacinamide · Panthenol · Vitamin E · Jojoba · Mango seed butter · Arrowroot

I did the same count on this one, in the same chair, and gave up somewhere past a dozen.

The most I counted on anything in the drawer was 2.

There’s menthol in this one too, and peppermint, and that’s the smell.

When I saw it on the back I thought I’d bought the same cream in a nicer jar.

It’s near the bottom of the list here instead of the top, and the peppermint is 2 lines under that.

The menthol does the first part, and by the time it wears off the slower ingredients have started.

In the other jars the menthol was the whole thing, so when it wore off I was back where I started.

Why the other 5 stopped when they did.

My daughter’s husband is a physical therapist and I got him to explain it at Easter, in the driveway, while he loaded the cooler.

The way he put it, standing there with the trunk open, there’s more than one thing going wrong down there at the same time.

I’d been buying one cream at a time, and expecting one cream to cover all of it.

Blood isn’t getting all the way down, and the toes are the far end of the longest nerve you’ve got.

The tissue around the nerve gets irritated and stays that way, and that’s what gets louder at night.

The nerve itself isn’t getting fed properly, so it fires when there’s nothing to fire at.

He drew it on the back of a gas receipt.

He said there are 4 layers of skin between a cream and the nerve that’s burning, and the nerve is at the bottom.

A cooling cream only has to reach the top one to feel like it’s working.

I used to think the warmth in the first 10 minutes was the whole thing working.

He said that’s the circulation coming up, and it has to happen before the slower part can start.

1. Scoop. About a fingertip’s worth. Less than you’d think.
2. Rub. Tops and soles, both feet, until it stops looking wet.
3. Wait. It’s gone in a minute or so. Nothing on the sheets.

It goes on when I brush my teeth, and that’s the only way I remember to do anything now.

There are 2 jars in the house now, one in the bathroom and one on the nightstand, because at 11 at night I’m not going downstairs.

The first week was mostly warmth, with the burning going quieter underneath.

Somewhere in the third week I noticed I wasn’t thinking about my feet in the evening.

My wife noticed before I did.

She said I’d stopped doing the thing with my heel against the bed frame.

Whether I had menthol right.

I’m not a scientist.

There’s a review paper on what menthol does in a rub-on product.²

It works on a cold receptor in the skin.³

But that receptor is in the surface of the skin.

It doesn’t reach the inflammation in the tissue underneath.

I looked at the cayenne too.

The strongest research on cayenne used a prescription patch, at a strength no jar of cream comes near.¹

The cayenne in here is for warmth and for getting blood down to the area.

It isn’t the same thing as that patch.

The frankincense is in there for the tissue part.

The compound in it has been written up in papers since 1992, which I hadn’t expected.⁴

The numbness in the 2 smallest toes on my left foot is where it was in February.

Nobody has told me it comes back and I’ve quit asking.

It did nothing for my brother-in-law either. His is in his hands.

Hundreds Of Verified Buyers Who Had Already Tried Other Creams First

Go on Lune’s own site and you will find plenty of reviews from people who had a drawer like mine.

People from all over, most of them having already been through 3 or 4 other creams before they got to this one.

I went through a good many of them afterwards.