How A 66-Year-Old In Arizona Got The Burning In His Feet To Quiet Down, Even Though His Blood Sugar Was Already In Range

“In 4 years nobody had asked what my feet actually felt like at night. The pharmacist who did sent my wife home with a cream, and that night I slept until 6 in the morning.”

Ray T., 66 · Arizona  /  April 9, 2026

It started in my left big toe.

It was one spot, about the size of a dime, and it felt like it had gone to sleep and never quite woke up.

I mentioned it at my next checkup.

4 years later it was both feet, from the toes back to the middle of the arch.

It didn’t feel asleep any more.

I’d fall asleep all right, and then something would wake me around 12:40, 12:50, and after that I’d be awake with the ceiling fan going and my feet burning.

Back down by 1:30 and I could still get 5 hours.

Past 2 and there was no point counting, so I’d go stand on the kitchen tile.

That works for 2 minutes, and then my feet are cold and the burning is still there.

I’ve never been able to explain it properly. It isn’t a sharp pain.

The closest I can get is a sunburn under the skin.

I’d been doing everything they told me to since 2012.

4 years of doing it right, and it kept getting worse.

I was diagnosed at 52.

I took it seriously from about the second week.

The burning turned up 10 years later.

I went at it one thing at a time and wrote down what I tried.

• Gabapentin, which my doctor prescribed and I took the way he told me to
• A second prescription, after the first left me foggy until lunchtime
• The freezing rubs off the drugstore shelf, 3 or 4 different ones
• Magnesium lotion, twice
• B-vitamin capsules for about 6 months
• New shoes, and a podiatrist to tell me which ones

Some of it helped a little.

The freezing rubs were good for about 20 minutes, half an hour if I was lucky, and then the cold wore off and the burning was still there.

Then it was magnesium lotions, gels, that sort of thing.

The gabapentin did dull it, and I’ve got no complaint about my doctor there.

It fogged up my mornings, though, and mornings are when I get anything done.

I stopped going out for the Thursday 9 holes about 2 years ago.

There was a fish tank in his waiting room with one fish in it, and I asked about it twice and got 2 different answers.

Nobody in all those years told me that keeping my numbers in range and getting blood down to my toes are 2 different things.

I’d been doing the first one since 2012 and I assumed it covered the second.

So I wrote down what I wanted before I bought anything else.

It had to say how it worked.

It had to still be doing something at 12:30 in the morning.

And I wanted to be able to send it back.

At the bottom I’d written ‘more than one thing in it’ and underlined it.

That notebook goes back to 2012.

It has the fasting number in it and the 2-hours-after-supper number, all of it in my handwriting.

None of it ever helped my feet.

My wife brought it back from the pharmacy without being asked.

She got talking to the pharmacist while she waited.

He asked her what my feet felt like, and what time of night.

In 4 years nobody had asked me that.

She put it on the nightstand and didn’t say much about it.

If she’d pushed it I’d have argued with her.

It sat by the lamp for 2 days.

There’s a drawer in that nightstand with the magnesium lotion in it and a pair of heated socks.

I want to say I opened it on the Thursday.

The trash goes out Thursday night and I remember wheeling the can down.

It was 12:40 or thereabouts and I wasn’t going to lie there doing arithmetic again.

The warmth came first, about 10 minutes in.

Then the burning went quiet underneath it, and I lay there waiting for it to come back.

I slept until 6.

It went the same way the 3 nights after that.

The jar said Lune on it.

It’s smaller than you’d expect, that jar.

I looked them up the next morning on the tablet, the way I look everything up.

There were doctors’ names on the site, neurology and one who does pain, and a piece in Men’s Health.

It did tell me there was a real company behind it.

There are 2 jars in this house now.

One’s on the nightstand and one’s in the bathroom, because at 11 o’clock I’m not walking down the hall for it.

There wasn’t one main ingredient in it.

Frankincense was the first thing on it.

Up to then I’d only ever heard that word in church, at Christmas.

Then there’s arnica, which my mother kept in the house for bruises, and willow bark, which is where aspirin came from originally.

The list kept going down the side of the jar, in print I needed my glasses for.

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

There’s menthol in here too, and peppermint. That’s the smell.

I’d bought 3 or 4 things by then that were mostly just cold.

On this list, menthol is down near the bottom.

In the drugstore rubs, menthol was more or less the whole product.

Here it seems to cover the first 20 minutes while the slower things get going.

Nobody had told me there was more than one problem.

So I went back to that pharmacy myself and asked him to explain it.

He drew it on the back of a paper bag with a line of people waiting behind me.

I’ve still got it in the drawer under the microwave.

As far as I could follow him, there was more than one thing going wrong down there, and everything I’d bought went after one of them.

Blood wasn’t getting all the way down to the ends of the nerves.

The toes are the last stop on the longest nerve you’ve got, which is why it started in one toe and worked its way back.

The tissue around the nerve was irritated and it wasn’t settling down.

And the nerve itself wasn’t getting fed, so it would fire off at nothing, which is what I was feeling at 2 in the morning.

There are 4 layers between a cream and the part that’s burning, and the burning is at the bottom.

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

That’s what the drugstore rubs were doing.

The warmth you get in the first 10 minutes is just the circulation waking back up.

1. Scoop. 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 about a minute. No shine, nothing on the sheets.

It goes on when I brush my teeth.

The first week it was the warmth, and the burning easing off underneath it.

By about week 3 I’d stopped thinking about my feet in the evenings, which took longer than I’d expected.

If you’ve got diabetes, look at your feet in daylight, and keep this off any skin that’s broken.

The paper that explained my own feet to me.

I’ve read a lot about this over 14 years and I can follow most of it.

The one that made the most sense of my own feet was about the small blood vessels in the skin of people with type 2 diabetes.

The worse those vessels behaved, the worse the neuropathy was.²

After I read it, a cream that warms the area up made more sense to me than it had.

The strongest research on cayenne was done with a prescription patch, at a strength no cream sold in a jar gets anywhere near.¹

What’s in this one is in there for warmth and for getting blood down to the area, and it doesn’t replace managing blood sugar.

Rubbing it on means it only reaches the nerve endings you put it on, instead of going through the rest of you.³

The MSM is in there for the inflammation side, and it works on one particular pathway rather than being a catch-all.⁴

That picture is a thermal camera on a bare foot after the cream went on.

I don’t know how much a picture like that proves.

It did nothing at all for my brother-in-law.

His came on after chemotherapy rather than diabetes, and he used the whole jar and told me at Easter he couldn’t tell any difference.

He hasn’t bought another one.

Hundreds Of Verified Buyers Report The Same Thing, Including People With Diabetes

Go on Lune’s own site and you will find plenty of reviews from people who had tried the drugstore creams first.

People from all over. Some of them diabetic like me, some who came to it after chemotherapy, and some who never got told why.

I read a lot of them before I ordered again.