The Real World, Diabetes: As Cameras Roll At A Jamaican Resort, Desperate Patients Seek Healing

The Real World, Diabetes: As cameras roll at a Jamaican resort, desperate patients seek healing

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica — The man who boasts of changing the face of diabetes spreads his arms out wide, like the Christ the Redeemer statue, but in neon orange shorts and bare feet. He looks earnestly into the rolling camera.
“Welcome to ‘Reversed,’” he intones. Seated behind him are four of his disciples: Americans with type 2 diabetes who’ve flown to this tropical beach town to participate in a reality TV show marketed as a momentous opportunity to restore their health. Over eight days, they’ll learn to exercise and eat right and bare their struggles in cathartic therapy sessions.
Their host, Charles Mattocks, is a smooth-talking, fast-moving entrepreneur, who has leveraged his family fame (his uncle was Bob Marley) and his own medical history (he uses diet and exercise, not insulin, to manage his diabetes) to set himself up as a guru to diabetics everywhere.
In an age where nearly 1 in 10 Americans has diabetes, a disease that can bring a lifetime of painful complications, patients are often desperate for miraculous turnarounds — and there’s a booming trade in supplements, diets, and self-help books that promise answers. Now, there’s a TV show, too.
But “Reversed” is unlikely to prove anyone’s salvation.
The show, which will begin airing next month on cable, is at once a vehicle for Mattocks to proselytize his gospel of self-help, a marketing gambit by a pharma company that’s running out of money, and a season-long advertisement for a luxury getaway at the sparkling resort where it was filmed.
The carefully choreographed, relentlessly upbeat atm Continue reading

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Type 2 Diabetes – Reversal with Lifestyle Change

MEET DAMIEN – (2004 – 2013) Doing no exercise, 19 stone in weight, a smoker, on medication for gout and blood pressure, diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and taking Diabetes medication to reduce the damage caused by high blood glucose to his eyes, heart, kidneys, limbs in fact, the entire body. Damien’s diabetes consultant was not a happy man. Damien needed to change and admits not being happy with himself.
2014
Damien tells us “In March of 2014 my company had a bonding day. The after-dinner speaker was a guy called Gerry Duffy who had completed 32 marathons in 32 days. He showed us pictures of himself before he started running. What I was looking at was a slim athlete who told us that anyone could do it. The following day, I said to myself ‘if Gerry can, I can’. I started out on the Killala Road and built up to 3 miles. It wasn’t easy but it was pleasing when I ran 3 miles without having to stop. Within 4 months, I ran my first half marathon. By the end of the year I had ran another half marathon and generally was running 4 times a week. The weight started to fall off and I was noticing it big time in my clothes”
“2015 brought more half marathons, a few 10 mile races and numerous 10k’s, I had joined Ballina AC at this stage and met a great bunch of running buddies and motivators.
“Health wise my blood sugars had levelled off, my consultant told me because of the exercise and weight loss I was heading towards reversing the diabetes”. My Diabetes consultant was a happy man and he was impressed.
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Background on Rev Continue reading

Who'll Be the First to Meld With the Machines? Diabetics

Tia Geri is the shortest player on her club soccer team. But that doesn’t stop her teammates from looking up to her. Geri, who turned 17 last month, has been playing with the same group of girls for almost as long as she’s been living with type 1 diabetes. And while she’s not the only one on the team with the disease, she is the only one with an artificial pancreas—a computer system that can control her insulin levels without her telling it to. A sensor on her abdomen monitors the glucose in her blood, and a pump adds the insulin her body needs to turn that sugar into energy.
Geri is one of the first people in the country to get the MiniMed 670G, the first bionic pancreas to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. She's been wearing hers since the fall of 2015, when she enrolled in the clinical trial that would eventually win the partially autonomous device regulatory approval. During a recent Monday night practice in Palo Alto, California, a teammate named Caroline watched Geri chase a soccer ball around a game of keep-away, while checking her own glucose meter and sipping a Capri Sun from the sidelines. “Tia’s so lucky,” she said. “I can’t wait until I get mine.”
Caroline and the rest of America's type 1 diabetics don’t have much longer to wait. Medtronic, the Minneapolis-based company that makes the device, is currently taking pre-orders it will ship to patients starting this June. And while the MiniMed 670G is not a technological cure for diabetes—patients still have to program in their meals, adjust their blood sugar targets when the Continue reading

Researchers develop contact lens that tells people with diabetes when they need to take medication

Researchers are developing a revolutionary contact lens that could change the lives of millions of people suffering from type 1 diabetes.
Living with the disease can be stressful as doctors recommend diagnosed patients test their blood four to eight times a day.
The lens would use people’s tears to monitor their blood glucose levels, saving them time and potentially improving their health.
“I have a friend who has diabetes, and saw the issues he faces managing his sugar levels,” Gregory Herman, leader of the Oregon State University research team, told The Independent.
Diabetes is a long-lasting health condition that causes the amount of sugar in the blood to become too high. There are two main types of diabetes: type 1 and type 2, both serious and without cure.
The pancreas produces a hormone called insulin that controls the level of glucose in the bloodstream. Patients diagnosed with type 1 diabetes don’t produce this hormone and need regular insulin treatment to avoid complications.
“My group started getting serious on glucose sensors for the development of an artificial pancreas a few years ago in collaboration with Pacific Diabetes Technologies," said Dr Herman.
“We decided to take a different direction than the company which led us to the transparent sensor that can be integrated into a contact lens."
The technology consists of a transparent biosensor that can go anywhere on the contact lens. This sensor detects changes to pH, or acidity levels, and measures the amount of glucose in tears.
“The lens will let people know when to give themselves injections Continue reading

Type 1 diabetes patients retain some ability to produce insulin

GAINESVILLE - As an autoimmune disease, Type 1 diabetes has long been thought to result from a complete immune system killing of the insulin-producing beta cells within the pancreas. Now, University of Florida Health researchers have made a striking discovery: some of the pancreas’ ability to produce insulin may remain for decades in people with Type 1 diabetes.
After studying the pancreata of those with Type 1 diabetes, researchers found insulin levels were low to undetectable among most — an expected finding given the absolute need for insulin therapy for all such patients. However, researchers found the amount of proinsulin, a protein precursor to insulin, were at near-normal levels and comparable to people without diabetes. The researchers also noted a small number of insulin-positive cells remain in pancreata of long-term Type 1 diabetes patients. That observation raised the question of how these cells avoided destruction by the immune system.
These findings, published Sept. 5 in the journal Cell Metabolism, have important implications for questions ranging from why Type 1 diabetes develops to how the disease might be reversed or cured, said Mark Atkinson, Ph.D., director of the UF Diabetes Institute and a professor in the UF College of Medicine’s departments of pathology and pediatrics.
In Type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system attacks insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas. The pancreas produces insulin to control the level of sugar in the blood. Elevated and uncontrolled blood sugar levels can lead to a variety of complications and, if left untreat Continue reading