Denying Health Care To Diabetics Makes Just About Zero Sense

Denying Health Care to Diabetics Makes Just About Zero Sense

Denying Health Care to Diabetics Makes Just About Zero Sense
Denying Health Care to Diabetics Makes Just About Zero Sense
Denying Health Care to Diabetics Makes Just About Zero Sense
Last week, the Trump administration made a new enemy: the American Diabetes Association. During a panel discussion at a forum for health care luminaries at Stanford University on Thursday, Trumps budget director Mick Mulvaney told an audience that the GOP bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act would take care of people with pre-existing conditions, but only to an extent. It doesnt mean we should be required to take care of the person who sits home, drinks sugary drinks, doesnt exercise, eats poorly, and gets diabetes, he said.
Diabetes affects nearly 30 million Americans, most of whom did not take kindly to the jab. Almost immediately, they took to Twitter to explain that both kinds of diabetestype 1 and type 2are the result of a both genetic and environmental factors. The ADA backed them up on Friday with a public statement decrying the notion that diabetes is a disease of choice: Mr. Mulvaneys comments perpetuate the stigma that one chooses to have diabetes based on his/her lifestyle. We are also deeply troubled by his assertion that access to health care should be rationed or denied to anyone.
Even if you subscribe to the notion that denying people health care is a morally acceptable way to get them to exercise or start eating better, there are still a few big problems with Mulvaneys assertion.
https://twitter.com/MurphyFerguson/status/863431106137395200
The first is an issue of bio Continue reading

Rate this article

Total 1 ratings

Best Tips on How to Manage Your Life with Diabetes During the Holidays

One of the biggest challenges of diabetes is figuring out how to fit it into your hectic life. Managing your day-to-day is hard enough, the business of the holidays - parties, shopping, dinners, and events can leave you feeling stressed, lost, and overwhelmed. Excess stress can negatively affect your weight and blood sugar control. It’s important to learn how to organize your diabetes as well as your activities and time.
Luckily, I asked Susan Weiner, the 2015 AADE Diabetes Educator of the Year (American Association of Diabetes Educators) and co-author of The Complete Diabetes Organizer: Your Guide to a Less Stressful and More Manageable Diabetes Life to let us in on some of her secrets.
Q: What is the best way to organize your diabetes during the holiday season?
A. There seems to be endless “to-do” lists from Halloween to New Year’s Day. With a few simple organizing strategies, you can continue to successfully manage your diabetes throughout the hectic holiday season.
Make a master holiday to do list. Create a list of everything you want and need to do and get done for the holiday season. Write your tasks in a notebook, in the notes section of your smart phone or on an app. Doing a “brain dump” will take the “remembering out of remembering” and keep you in control of your activities and diabetes management.
Use a calendar. Break your to-do list into smaller tasks. Write each task in your calendar. Space out and check off each task as it’s completed.
Always plan ahead. Do your holiday shopping whenever is convenient. Cook and freeze your holiday meals week Continue reading

Tackling Weight Loss and Diabetes With Video Chats

Well |Tackling Weight Loss and Diabetes With Video Chats
Robin and Wayne Collier have lost weight with recipes like a mock apple cobbler, made with zucchini and sugar-free ice cream. Credit Lyndon French for The New York Times
About a year and a half ago, Robin Collier and her husband, Wayne, were like millions of other Americans: overweight and living with Type 2 diabetes. Despite multiple diets, the couple could not seem to lose much weight. Then Ms. Colliers doctor told her she was going to need daily insulin shots to control her diabetes. That was the motivation she needed.
I made up my mind right then and there, said Ms. Collier, 62, an administrator at an accounting firm in Lafayette, Ind. I said to myself, Im not going on insulin. Im too young to have this disease.
Instead, Ms. Collier and her husband entered a study sponsored by a company called Virta Health, one of a new crop of high-tech companies that have designed programs aimed at helping people prevent or even reverse their diabetes.
On the program, patients video-chat with a remote Virta doctor, who consults with their primary care doctor, reviews their blood tests and medical history, and makes diet and drug recommendations. While studies show that a variety of different diets can benefit people with Type 2 diabetes, Virta, based in San Francisco, takes a low-carbohydrate approach, training patients to swap foods like pastries, pasta and sugary snacks for veggie omelets, almonds and salads with grilled chicken and beef.
The Colliers now eat balanced, home-cooked meals. Credit Lyndon French for The Ne Continue reading

Diabetes: Smart insulin patches developed at UNC, NCSU a step closer to market | News & Observer

The Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University was founded in 2003 to bring engineers and medical researchers together to solve pressing healthcare issues. Gu, an associate professor in the department, has been working with his colleagues to remedy the imperfections of current insulin delivery methods.
In the healthy body, insulin secretion always quickly follows the blood sugar levels, says Gu. We want to mimic this process in a scientific way ourselves.
Their solution is a glucose-responsive smart insulin patch that is worn on the skin and instantaneously releases insulin as needed. Roughly the same size as a dime, the patch contains 121 microneedles, each thinner than a human hair and pre-loaded with tiny packets of insulin and glucose oxidase, an enzyme that immediately responds to high glucose levels and sparks a reaction that releases insulin.
If youre a very strict, Type A person who is on an extreme schedule, basically always eats the same thing, has the same activity, and youre really good at math and nutrition, then you might not need this patch. But no one is perfect.
Susan Spratt, associate professor of medicine at Duke University
The on-demand actions of the insulin patches could help people with diabetes worry less about their glucose levels regardless of their activity levels and food intake while also increasing the accuracy of insulin dosing. Not only would the patch prevent high blood glucose, it also would reduce the chance of taking too much insulin, which can result in dangerously low blood glucose lev Continue reading

Engineering a Cure for Type 2 Diabetes

With the failure of forty years of dietary guidelines to arrest or improve the incidence of diabetes and obesity, new thinking and approaches are needed. Applying an engineering mindset to nutrition has attracted attention as some of the new thinking has emerged using root cause analysis and other engineering tools. This has resulted in new insights for the medical and nutrition communities.
This is not really new, I pay homage to doctors like Dr Bernstein who trained as an engineer first, then as a trained doctor realised how controlling diabetes was like an engineering control problem.
Recently, however, as a recovering type 2 diabetic, I plotted my HbA1c against the results of a long-term vegan cure for diabetesstudy to see how it compared. I was astounded by the superior result and tweeted that it was a fifteen sigma improvement. While not reallycorrect, it got me thinking of my recovery in terms of engineering control theory and quality management.
Putting aside whether a cure is possible (for type 2 diabetes) and considering treatment, what if we view diabetes as an engineering control problem and applied control charting to understand the quality of different management options? Note that while I have type 2 diabetes, the glycaemic control problem is common to type 1 and so much of this analysis also is relevant to them too.
Glucose comes from sugar and other carbohydrates (carbs) like starch from bread, rice and pasta. Your body uses about 130g of glucose a day (about 33 teaspoons). Normally, there is no more than about one teaspoon of glucose in your blood at Continue reading