How A 71-Year-Old In Ohio Got 3 Years Of Burning Feet To Quiet Down Without Ever Knowing What Caused It

“A cream my daughter left on the counter, which I let sit for 2 days. 3 weeks later I was cooking a whole dinner standing up again.”

Diane R., 71 · Ohio  /  June 18, 2026

It always started around 3 in the morning.

It’s not a sharp pain, more of a burning under the skin of both feet.

I’d been lying still since 11 with the fan going.

By 6 I’d go down and put the coffee on.

One night I looked over and the clock said 2:41.

My husband’s clock radio has a piece missing out of the top of the 4.

There was a stretch where I’d go down for the gel ice pack and sit on the closed lid of the toilet with it under my feet.

The dog would come in and lie on the mat and watch me do it.

It buys you about half an hour.

Then the cold goes out of it and the burning comes back up through, and I’m sitting in a cold bathroom at 3 in the morning.

By year 3 I’d stopped bringing it up.

The garden was the first thing to go, and I minded that less than I expected, because I’d been thinking about putting most of it down to grass anyway.

Standing long enough to cook a proper dinner went after that.

The walk after dinner stopped happening one week and then didn’t happen again.

So I’d tell my daughter I was tired.

She never asked anything past that.

My granddaughter is 8.

She was on the floor with the dog and she looked up and said, “Grandma, how come you always say next time?”

I said something about my knees and went to check the oven.

I could still walk out to the mailbox and back, and I did that most days.

I did what they told me and my feet still burned.

I was 68 when I had the nerve test.

The word on the printout was idiopathic.

Nobody knows why is what that comes to, and he said it about like that.

That was the year I started spending money on it.

Here’s what I bought over the next 3 years.

• Gabapentin, taken the way it was written
• 2 prescription creams, from 2 different doctors
• The freezing rubs from the drugstore, more than one brand
• Magnesium lotions, gels, that sort of thing, off Amazon
• Epsom soaks, and the ice pack
• 2 specialists, a nerve test, and a printout

Some of it helped a little.

The freezing rubs, the blue ones, those I bought 4 different brands of, and they worked.

They gave me about 20 minutes of cold.

Then the cold wore off and the burning was still down there underneath it.

The magnesium lotions I never noticed one way or the other.

The gabapentin did dull it, and I stayed on it about a year.

But it fogged me in until noon, and I’ve been getting up at 6 my whole life.

The second specialist was in a building with a coffee place in the lobby that had little almond cookies by the register. They were good cookies, those.

I used to get there 20 minutes early on purpose.

My husband thought I liked the doctor.

I stopped buying things in the spring.

I want to say March, because the storm windows were still up. It might have been April.

So I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out what I wanted before I bought anything else.

It had to tell me how it worked.

It had to still be doing something an hour later.

It had to be returnable.

At the bottom I’d written “no more menthol on its own” and underlined it.

I kept the receipts a while in case any of it could go back.

Most of it couldn’t.

My daughter left something on the counter and didn’t say anything about it.

She put it next to the bread box with the mail on top of it.

It sat there 2 days.

She works in a hospital kitchen, and one of the nurses there had been putting it on her own mother’s feet for about a year.

I opened it on the Thursday.

It was half past midnight and I’d already been up once.

The warmth came first, 10 minutes in or thereabouts, and then the burning went quiet underneath it.

I slept until 6.

It was the same on the 4th night, and again on the 5th.

The lid said Lune.

Next morning I looked them up on the computer.

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

I don’t know how much any of that is worth.

It’s a heavy little jar, that one, heavier than you’d expect for the size.

There are 2 of them now, one in the bathroom and one on the nightstand.

At 11 at night I’m not walking down the hall for it.

The list on the back was longer than I expected.

The list is on the back in small print, and I had to go and get my glasses for it.

First thing on the list was frankincense.

I’d only ever heard that word at Christmas.

Arnica was next. My mother kept arnica in the house for bruises, in a green tube.

Willow bark was on there too, and the list keeps going after that.

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 it as well, and peppermint, and that’s where the smell comes from.

I stopped at that one. Menthol was the thing I’d told myself I was finished with.

In the other rubs I’d bought, the menthol was most of what was in them, and on this list it’s down near the bottom.

It does the first 20 minutes while the slower ingredients get going.

I put the lid back on and left it in the bathroom.

There was more than one thing wrong down there.

The nurse called me back through my daughter while I was doing the dishes.

I had to ask her to say part of it twice.

As far as I follow it, there is more than one thing going wrong down there, and everything I’d been buying only dealt with one of them.

Blood isn’t getting all the way down.

My feet are at the end of the longest nerve in the body, so they’re last in line for it.

The tissue around the nerve is irritated and stays that way, and that makes the burning worse.

The nerve itself isn’t getting fed properly, and it sends off pain when nothing is happening.

Every cream I’d bought was answering the first one.

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

A cooling cream only has to reach the top one to feel like it’s working. That’s what the blue ones were doing.

The warmth in the first 10 minutes is the circulation coming up.

Nothing slower gets going until that happens.

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, and nothing on the sheets.

I do it when I brush my teeth, or I’d forget.

Well, week 1 was the warmth and the burning going quiet under it, and that was all.

By week 3 I’d go a whole afternoon without thinking about them.

I wanted to know if any of that held up.

I’m not a scientist.

My son-in-law showed me how to find the papers on the computer.

The strongest work on cayenne was done with a prescription patch, at a strength no jar of cream comes near.¹

What’s in this one is there for warmth and for getting blood down to the area.

The cayenne works on a receptor in the skin called TRPV1. It only reaches the nerve endings you put it on.²

The frankincense is listed as boswellia in the papers.

There are acids in it that block an enzyme involved in inflammation, and people have been studying that since 1992.³

Willow bark is where salicin comes from, and the body turns that into salicylic acid.⁴

That picture is the warmth showing up on a camera.

At the end of week 1 I still wasn’t sure about it. If I’d stopped on day 4 I’d have put it in the drawer with the rest of them.

Hundreds Of Verified Buyers Report The Burning Going Quiet At Night

Go on Lune’s own site and you will find plenty of reviews from people who had given up on creams before they tried this one.

People from all over, with nerve trouble that started in all sorts of ways. Diabetes, chemotherapy, an injury, or nothing anybody could ever put a name to.

I read a lot of them before I ordered the second jar.