Diabetes Health Professionals

Diabetes is a complex and serious condition potentially affecting many systems of your body. Because of this, you may need to visit a range of health professionals regularly, and have them as part of your team. People often ask about what roles different health professionals play in diabetes management and who and when they should see them. There are a number of health professionals who you do need to see regularly, and others who you might call on or be referred to at times. Many of their roles overlap, but each person has their own area of expertise and training.
You!
The number one person in the management of your diabetes is YOU! You will be the person making most of the daily decisions, with the support and back up of your health care team when needed. This includes management of medications and insulin; and food and exercise choices. It also includes things like working out what to do about low and high blood glucose levels, and making decisions about things like alcohol, drugs and eating out.
You will be the one dealing with daily life stress such as other illness, going to work and caring for your family, at the same time as managing your diabetes. Basically you will are the expert about you and your diabetes. This takes time and it is important to take this time, to learn as much as you can. If you are new to your diabetes diagnosis, try not to panic about all there is to learn and not to worry about what you don’t know. Focus on what you are learning and what your priorities are at this moment in time. It is important that you can have easy access to medical car Continue reading

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The Perfect Treatment for Diabetes and Weight Loss

Do doctors treat type 2 diabetes completely wrong today – in a way that actually makes the disease worse? Many people would correctly say yes. There’s a better way.
What is the perfect treatment for type 2 diabetes – and for weight loss? Many people would say a strict LCHF diet – I would have said that myself, at one time. But that may just be a good start.
Many readers have told me about the Canadian nephrologist Dr. Jason Fung and his exciting work. But it was only recently that I got to meet him and record this interview.
Dr. Fung
Dr. Fung treats people with severe type 2 diabetes, and to them LCHF may not be effective enough – even if it’s a good starting point. Dr. Fung has found something significantly more effective. And as a side effect it’s also likely to be the world’s most effective method for weight loss, whether you have diabetes or not.
In this 12 minute interview – that you can see above – he goes through all the basics.
Observe: This treatment is extremely effective. If you have diabetes and take blood sugar lowering medication (especially insulin injections) you may need to reduce the doses a lot to avoid potentially dangerous hypoglycemia. You may instantly become too healthy for your medication.
More knowledge
There is a 32 minute second part to the interview, where Dr. Fung goes through many more practical tips and answers common questions. This second part is on the membership pages (free one month trial):
The Perfect Treatment for Diabetes and Weight Loss – full interview
Here are a few of the things Dr. Fung mentions in the full Continue reading

A Prescription for a Plant-Based Diet Can Help Reverse Diabetes

Mark Hatfield via Getty Images
Chances are good that you have diabetes or know someone who does. Even if you don’t, you’re paying for the care of millions of people with diabetes through your taxes. It’s a disease that affects people of all backgrounds, income levels, and, increasingly, ages, and it costs our country nearly a quarter trillion dollars every year — that’s well over the total yearly revenue of electronics giant Apple.
New statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 29 million Americans have diabetes and another 86 million have prediabetes. Hardest hit are Native Americans, followed by African Americans and Latinos. They are at far greater risk for heart attacks, blindness, amputations, kidney failure, painful nerve symptoms, and loss of a decade of life compared with those who do not have the disease.
But a recent report has found that one simple prescription could help reverse diabetes, improve blood sugar, and lower weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. It could allow the 115 million Americans with diabetes or prediabetes to dramatically reduce their medications or get off them entirely. And all this is possible, the analysis found, not with a new magic pill, but with tried-and-true, simple changes to diet.
A team of researchers from the United States and Japan, including the Physicians Committee’s Susan Levin, MS, RD and myself, published a new meta-analysis showing that a plant-based diet significantly improves diabetes management.
Combining the results of six prior studies, we found that a plant-based diet boost Continue reading

Diabetes

Diabetes is the result of the body not making enough insulin to keep blood glucose (sugar) levels within the normal range. If the glucose in a person’s blood is too high, over time it can lead to damage of multiple body systems, including the feet.
There are three main types of diabetes:
Type 1 diabetes: is a chronic condition where the pancreas produces little or no insulin, a hormone needed to allow sugar (glucose) to enter cells to make energy for the body.
Type 2 diabetes: (adult-onset or noninsulin-dependent diabetes) is a chronic condition that affects the way your body metabolises sugar (glucose), an important source of fuel for the body.
Gestational diabetes: is a condition where women, without previously diagnosed diabetes, show high blood glucose (blood sugar) levels during pregnancy. Gestational diabetes is caused by faulty insulin responses.
The effect of diabetes on the feet
Some people with diabetes develop complications due to their diabetes. Two of the common foot related complications of diabetes are:
Damage to nerves (neuropathy)
Damage to blood vessels (vascular disease)
Diabetic Neuropathy
People with diabetes sometimes develop nerve damage to their feet which may result in either whole or part of their feet becoming numb and insensitive to pain or injury.
If you have diabetic neuropathy in your feet you are:
More likely to get an injury AND less likely to know to get help for the injury early on.
Diabetic Vascular Disease
Diabetes can cause the lining of blood vessels to become thickened meaning that less blood is able to travel through the blood vess Continue reading

Father Devises A 'Bionic Pancreas' To Help Son With Diabetes

An alarm sounds on Ed Damiano's night stand in the middle of the night. He jumps out of bed and rushes into his son's room next door.
His son, David, has Type 1 diabetes. The 15-year-old sleeps hooked up to a monitor that sounds an alarm when his blood sugar gets too low. If it drops sharply, David could die in his sleep.
"The fear is that there's going to be this little cold limb, and I screwed up. It's all on me," Damiano says.
But when he touches David's hand, he's warm. He's OK. Damiano says, "That's the moment of relief."
The father has been doing this night after night since his son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was 11 months old.
But Damiano has done more than nightly monitoring to try to protect his son. He's an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, and has shifted the focus of his career to developing a better way to care for people with Type 1 diabetes.
"It's intimidating when you start considering the list of things that influence blood sugar," he says. "Emotions and physical activity, if you're healthy. You can't possibly take into account and balance all those things. And sometimes you get it right. And often you get it wrong."
Damiano has developed a system he calls a "bionic pancreas" designed to help people better manage their blood sugar. He's racing to get it approved by the Food and Drug Administration before his son leaves for college in three years.
In tests with 52 teenagers and adults, the device did a better job controlling blood sugar than the subjects typically did on their own. The results were reported S Continue reading