And what happens to the pill? Does it get absorbed by the body?
New pill can deliver insulin
181–190 of 260 posts
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know a single diabetic who cares about injections and blood sugar tests. I'm diabetic and the sole reason I don't check my blood sugar (unless I think something is drastically out of whack) is that it takes me upwards of 30 minutes to do a finger prick for testing. My anxiety skyrockets and nothing I do can tell me that it's not going to be excruciating. Most of the time I end up having my wife do it, which…
Why do diabetics use one of the most sensitive parts of the human body for blood testing? Why not prick your forearm, or your leg, or anywhere else?
Latency
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a T1D here. I once had my test meter go bad on an international trip; by the time I realized it wasn't working I was on a deserted island that was an about a 4-hour boat ride away from the nearest pharmacy, which was closed. Talk about stress levels going through the roof!
> Talk about stress levels going through the roof! (Which, of course, is EXACTLY what you want to have happen when you have no way of monitoring your BG.) Yikes!
LOL, yeah. Looking back on it now, five years later, it's a bit humorous. I went and found the resort manager and explained the whole situation to her. She didn't know anything about diabetes, so she really wasn't understanding how severe the situation was.
Resort Manager - "Won't you be ok for a week until the boat makes a trip back to the mainland for supplies?"
Me - "No, I'll be dead before then."
Resort Manager - "Is it really that serious? Do you know how much it will cost? It's really going to cost a lot of money; you will have to pay for the gas, the boat crew, and the pharmacy isn't even open on Saturdays. This is really going to cost a LOT of money."
Me - "I don't care how much it costs. I'm a dead man without it. Go wake up the boat crew and call the emergency line for the pharmacy and have someone come in."
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the pointer. I have a FRIO, and love it. I wasn't aware that they made FRIOs for pumps.
Agreed with the other user's assessment of pumps. I've had T1D since 1990; been wearing a pump since 2004. My A1C has averaged 6.3 since 2000 (so I was in control before I started on the pump) - and I lived in Los Angeles from 2000 to 2008 (so I've dealt with the heat). Personally, I've rarely had an issue with the heat affecting my pump's reservoir - except when I would go skydiving up in the Mojave desert, where te…
Yeah; it's really too bad that the Medtronic CGM is not better. I think Medtronic's pump is slightly ahead of the Tandem pump today on the closed loop, but I'm hoping Tandem catches up this summer if they get their new predictive algorithm approved for automating correction dosing for high BG.
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm like you when I do any activity having insulin on board. I'm a T1 using a pump, and I really like the combination of a pump and CGM for staying away from surprises. I use AndroidAPS to monitor my glucose and insulin on board, taking a temporary basal setting of 0% if needed before any activity, so my insulin on board drops to the base level or a bit below. Soon the insurance replaces my pump to a Dana RS, which s…
You are spot on. The temporary reduction or even suspension of insulin depending on my activity are key in preventing lows for me. The closed loop pumps are the biggest improvement I've seen for living with T1. There's always lots of promises, but this is one of the few things that really improves my life on a day to day basis and it just keeps getting better.
Right now it seems there is official support only to prevent hypos, but not to give you more insulin at night when you ate something too heavy and didn't guess the right TBR.
Only the open source AndroidAPS for Android and Loop for iOS do this. And then you have a very limited set of pumps you can use.
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#186Plant based diet can reverse diabetes ( I and II ). For type I milk products need to be stopped. Take 1% of your bodyweight as fruits. Take 1 % of your body weight as Raw ( uncooked ) vegetables. Take 10% of that vegetable quota as green leafy vegetables. Based on China Study by Colin Campbell. e.g. weight 150 pounds 1.5 pounds fruits before 1 pm 1.5 pounds raw vegetables for the day If you are still hungry you can e…
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19114135 and marked it off-topic.
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> With the right compound in the needle, thst sounds like an incredible way to assassinate someone without leaving any traces which are unlikely to be found. If I recall correctly there was a story about a CIA weapon that shot a needle or dart made of a frozen toxin. It would penetrate the skin, melt, and cause a heart attack. There would be no evidence other than an incredibly hard to find hole in the skin with no…
I don't think that myth would work out although it is a common one. Namely it would show up on a tox screen in some way presumably. Since that is usually how poisonings are found - granted they would need to do an autopsy in the first place.
The interesting thing that isn’t usually an issue with tox screens is the they are limited. You can search whole classes or drugs, but ultimately a truly novel poison would be detectable in principle, but likely to go unnoticed. Now for you and me that’s enough, because we have the resources of individuals, but a large lab and especially a government can afford to engineer toxins that are not tested yet.
Having said that, such a toxin that could also be frozen and the resulting “dart” being strong enough to survive being fired into someone, is not perfect. Like the poison umbrella, you’d expect traces of toxin to be found around the wound, and even small wounds become evident under ALS.
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#188> Once ingested, water dissolves a disk of sugar, using a spring to release a tiny needle made up almost entirely of freeze-dried insulin. The needle is injected into the stomach — which the patient can’t feel, owing to a lack of pain receptors in the stomach. Once the injection has occurred, the needle can break down in the digestive tract. That's some pretty impressive ingenuity. Also sounds kinda terrifying if the…
Less painful but it's hard to see how this would be as reliable as a standard dermal injection. Pumps definitely have reliability issues but they tend to alert in most cases.
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just so you know, those days there are ways to monitor glucose levels without finger pricking, google: glucose monitor without needle. source:RN
Most (maybe all?) CGMs need to be calibrated regularly with finger pricks. In fact in the case of both the Dexcom G5 (haven't known anyone on the G6) and Medtronic Guardian sensors they can occasionally sort of derp out and ask for multiple calibrations in a row for utterly mysterious reasons. I just asked and my partner says the most times she has had to test to get a Guardian sensor back to normal was seven times i…
Dexcom 6 doesn't need to be calibrated anymore. Well, it still needs the first calibration when you insert it, but none other than that. Lasts for some 2-3 weeks before sensor needs replacing.
Re: New pill can deliver insulin
#190> Once ingested, water dissolves a disk of sugar, using a spring to release a tiny needle made up almost entirely of freeze-dried insulin. The needle is injected into the stomach — which the patient can’t feel, owing to a lack of pain receptors in the stomach. Once the injection has occurred, the needle can break down in the digestive tract. That's some pretty impressive ingenuity. Also sounds kinda terrifying if the…
What doctors and researchers get wrong about diabetes is that pin-pricks and injections are not even remotely bad. I don't know a single diabetic who cares about injections and blood sugar tests. You get used to that within the first week of diagnosis. No, the unpleasant part of being diabetic is having to live every second of your life as an act of weighing how what you're currently doing is going to affect your blo…
Type 1 for 30ish years... I wish there was some way to move this comment to the top of this thread. You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Yeah, injections suck, but the real sinister issue is the constant attention it requires, and if you don't pay attention, you can get in trouble (hospital, death) real fast. Longer term, lose limbs, eyesight, etc.