Everything you always wanted to know about nerve, but were afraid to ask

The paper by Datema and colleagues (Datema et al., 2012) has the merit of dealing with a part of the peripheral nervous system that is often overlooked or less investigated: small fibers. And they do it through simple tests (!) while instead we tend to neglect things that are difficult to investigate. Much of a nerve and much of its function are usually not evaluated. When we deal with the peripheral nerve we usually record the maximal conduction velocity and the evoked response. Working with these measures we are self-confident thanks to our knowledge, and we often try to improve what does not really need to be improved, because the sensitivity is usually high and further improvement might decrease the specificity of the test.