23 Million and Counting « Insulintruth’s Weblog

Background:

My name is Michael D. Dana and I've been a Type 1 diabetic since 1974, when I was diagnosed shortly after my high school graduation. I am currently in amazingly good health, considering not only the diabetes, but that I was also, and not coincidentally I believe, diagnosed with osteoporosis in 2001 (See early posts). For the last 25 years, I've been managing my condition myself, and I've come to some different conclusions regarding treatment strategies. My condition was amazingly stable after the first few years, and when I had my first A1c (that I knew about) in 1996, it was 4.5% where it had probably been most of the time. This all changed when insulin was removed from the market in 1998 and replaced with biosynthetic human insulin, known by the brand names Humulin(tm) and Novolin(tm). After that my life became a nightmare of unexplained glucose highs and lows and an almost total inability to recognize the onset of insulin shock, frequently accompanied by blackouts. I quickly realized the only way to maintain any semblance of control was to constantly monitor my sugar and react accordingly. At first there appeared to be no pattern, but more recently I have come to believe there are interacting cycles causing these effects, and have in some cases, been able to anticipate periods of high or low sugars. Hence the daily log you see below. Looking through it, you may be dismayed by the frequent use of sugary foods. This is because I use them to bump up my sugar incrementally, without committing to a meal and a major sugar excursion. I regard every morning I start with a normal blood sugar as a success. From then on, my sugar must be checked regularly to see how it decides to behave that day. You'll note that it behaves one way one day and on another day, under identical circumstances, behaves in an opposite manner. This is also why pumps, which may be fine for many diabetics, cannot be used by persons with both erratic sugars and especially hypoglycemia unawareness. It's a sure recipe for disaster.

23 Million and Counting

Posted by insulintruth on March 16, 2009

After talking with my friend Jim Yoakum about the difficulty getting accurate data regarding the number of diabetics in the US, he found a very good site, the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse, which contains valuable statistical information regarding diabetes. It states there are 23.6 million diagnosed and estimated undiagnosed diabetics in the US, not as CBS’ Good Morning show stated on its web page a few years ago, ‘about one million.”

http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/

I also found a site that shows the steady increase in deaths among diabetics since the advent of biosynthetic ‘human’ insulin:

http://www.diabetictypeone.org/Charts,%20Stats%20&%20Policy1.html

I’ll add these to the blogroll tomorrow.

Oh, I mis-stated the amount of time for the PDGF inhibitor to restore beta cell function, going back over the study (see blogroll) it was ten days, not ten weeks!

This entry was posted on March 16, 2009 at 8:45 am and is filed under Diabetes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Insulintruth’s Weblog

Living with Hypoglycemia Unawareness & some thoughts about insulin

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23 Million and Counting

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