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Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

martin.janiczek.cz

81–90 of 372 posts

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#81
post #55

Interesting read. My wife is T1D, moved to a closed loop last year. It has been life changing for her - this is not an understatement. Her mental health has massively improved because she isn't having up to 3-4 hypos a day. One thing not mentioned in the intro, hormones hugely affect T1D. She's started perimenopause and everything went out of the window. Closed loop has made this much more manageable.

Indeed, insulin sensitivity varies so based on amount of movement during day, stress, hormones, allergies, slight cold, etc that the rigid algorithmic approach they teach patients doesn't work in practice. I.e. you can follow what you're taught by diabetic nurse and you'll have bad control nonetheless. What's the model she uses? My guess would be tslim+Dexcom? It does reduce stress a lot.

She's using omnipod + dexcom g6.

The omnipod was a good change for her as there was one fewer places to fail (being airbubbles in the piping).

And now with the closed loop, it's stepped up again.

One thing she has found though - her hypo awareness has dropped. They 'feel different'.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#82

Not a diabetic and I live in one of the richest countries with a social medical system, but the medical industry is an abject failure. My experience with most Doctors who are not surgeons has mostly been that are overpaid for doing essentially nothing and think all their patients are hypochondriacs.

I also lived in two of the richest countries with a social medical system My experience is that GPs are over-worked, under paid (given their responsibilities), and can only afford to do shallow diagnostic in the 5-10 minutes they've got per patient. That's explained by a slow but relentless dismantling of any operational margin that existed in the system, whether it's financial, time etc. I'm talking about the situat…

> My experience is that GPs are over-worked, under paid (given their responsibilities

Their work hours are no longer than anyone else, their pay is way above the average, and their liability is as low as possible.

> and can only afford to do shallow diagnostic in the 5-10 minutes they've got per patient.

My doctor spends it explaining to me how I should just not care that something is wrong and accept that the medical industry is too incompetent to figure out what it is and that there are people who have worse problems, even though he has no idea what is actually wrong.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#83

Very dumb question here, but I don’t dare ask it to ChatGPT. What would happen to T1 or T2 diabetics if we would stop eating all sources of sugars and carbs? So no fruit, no rice, no potatoes and so on? Would it be possible to survive and live comfortably in a state of Ketosis? Or is a 100% ketogenic diet simply not possible on diabetes? I’m asking because my true question is: what if insulin becomes too expensive? T…

I'm not a medical expert, but as far as I'm aware even a 100% ketogenic diet would still have fluctuations in glucose levels which would require insulin to manage. But, it's entirely dependent on how much insulin a T1 or T2 diabetic's body is still capable of producing which would determine if they would still need exogenous insulin. (Because the quantity required _would_ be much lower than on a higher carb diet)

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#84

Interesting read. My wife is T1D, moved to a closed loop last year. It has been life changing for her - this is not an understatement. Her mental health has massively improved because she isn't having up to 3-4 hypos a day. One thing not mentioned in the intro, hormones hugely affect T1D. She's started perimenopause and everything went out of the window. Closed loop has made this much more manageable.

The mental and physical benefits of improved glucose management cannot be overstated

Definitely - but it is also that she doesn't need to keep such a management on it, freeing her mentally. That and not yoyoing in sugars (and feeling like a failure).

Her description: what else can you do for 30 years and still feel like a failure as it isn't working like it should?

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#85

Very dumb question here, but I don’t dare ask it to ChatGPT. What would happen to T1 or T2 diabetics if we would stop eating all sources of sugars and carbs? So no fruit, no rice, no potatoes and so on? Would it be possible to survive and live comfortably in a state of Ketosis? Or is a 100% ketogenic diet simply not possible on diabetes? I’m asking because my true question is: what if insulin becomes too expensive? T…

[deleted]

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#86

Very dumb question here, but I don’t dare ask it to ChatGPT. What would happen to T1 or T2 diabetics if we would stop eating all sources of sugars and carbs? So no fruit, no rice, no potatoes and so on? Would it be possible to survive and live comfortably in a state of Ketosis? Or is a 100% ketogenic diet simply not possible on diabetes? I’m asking because my true question is: what if insulin becomes too expensive? T…

T1 and T2 are completely different diseases. T2 should not be called diabetes. It should be called insulin resistance or chronic carbohydrate overdose.

I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic/T2. I started wearing a cgm and watching how various foods affected my blood sugar. I eliminated foods that caused spikes, and started cooking my own meals so I could control what went into them. I wound up with a very low carb diet of meat and vegetables, and a very stable blood sugar with NO spikes ever. According to my blood work and checkups I cured my NAFLD, cured my hypertension (including getting off drugs for that), and "cured" my pre-diabetes. I lost a lot of weight, but still have a lot more to lose.

I put cured in quotes because I don't think this diet can cure you once you're bad enough to need treatment. I think it can only put your disease into remission so that you don't suffer any health effects from it. Some of us just can't overeat carbs or we develop this disease, and the only effective treatment is to stop eating the carbs.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#87

>Aside: what do you .NET folks use nowadays? Winforms lol, it just works and I don't have to spend most of my time trying to work out xaml stuff. Just add the components to the window, set up some event handlers, done

But have you tried the NET(X)BigTHING framework for GUI? Its a chain of hype-(r-links) forming a gui..

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#88

Very dumb question here, but I don’t dare ask it to ChatGPT. What would happen to T1 or T2 diabetics if we would stop eating all sources of sugars and carbs? So no fruit, no rice, no potatoes and so on? Would it be possible to survive and live comfortably in a state of Ketosis? Or is a 100% ketogenic diet simply not possible on diabetes? I’m asking because my true question is: what if insulin becomes too expensive? T…

It's actually a quite complex question that does not have a clear cut answer. In case of T2D you can 'go into remission' meaning you can get your blood glucose levels to 'normal levels' with little or even no medication (T2Ds are not necessarily using insulin, they can also use medication that increases insulin sensitivity such as metformin). Generally weight loss, exercise and a healthy diet are what allows them to accomplish that and a keto / low carb diet can definitely help there.

For T1Ds I'm afraid even a keto diet still contains too much carbs to live healthily without insulin. Unfortunately if your body has fully stopped producing insulin and you don't take any artificial insulin your life expectancy is not looking good regardless of how you live.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#89

Not a diabetic and I live in one of the richest countries with a social medical system, but the medical industry is an abject failure. My experience with most Doctors who are not surgeons has mostly been that are overpaid for doing essentially nothing and think all their patients are hypochondriacs.

To be fair, most people probably are hypochondriacs. Somehow we have come to expect that all our nagging ailments should be fully treatable by either a pill or a surgery. In reality, human body is pretty good at self-repairing and self-regulating and modern medicine can help it only in certain clear cut cases. Medicine is just not that good and the doctors know it.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#90
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is a doctor (GP, before internal medicine in biggest hospitals), experience with France and Switzerland. What you say is true - they all start as naive optimists who get treated brutally by whole healthcare system first 7-10 years after school, everybody knows it, often illegal from hospitals but good luck suing your employer. Burned out, 60-70 hour work weeks with weekends is the standard, night shifts, a lo…

Doctors burning-out is probably the worse red-flag you could have for a health system. It's frightening to think the person diagnosing my parents and children might not be in full possession of their capacity or make rash decisions. I'm seeing the same pattern for many crucial functions having been pushed over the line during the last two decades or so. Whether it's a doctor, a teacher, a nurse, a childminder, the po…

If that worries you (and it should), never ever go to hospital during night (unless serious emergency of course) or very early morning, or generally just before the end of shifts. You will get potentially worse treatment by definition, depends on many things but probability is against you.

Also, the bigger the hospital usually the better experts they have on critical stuff (and more chance you won't wait long for ie CT or MRI), smaller hospitals and clinics just forward serious patients to big ones.

At the end healthcare is just another branch of market and all woes that apply to rest of us apply to them, no magical immunity due to more noble profession.

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