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Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

martin.janiczek.cz

101–110 of 372 posts

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#101
post #2

My dad had a strange case of Type-1 diabetes that manifested later in life, at the same time he also got hit with rheumatoid arthritis. > injecting insulin ~15min before you start eating would do wonders for neutralizing the BG spike, the issue is, nobody does it, My dad did. Yeah, it did cause a couple scares. He had very well-controlled numbers but it was all-consuming and I can’t imagine the average person being a…

Not that strange. Adult-onset T1D is just as common as Juvenile-onset; it just happens to often get misdiagnosed as T2D. Both T1D and RA are autoimmune, so it's not surprising they showed up around the same time. He was probably infected with a virus a few years earlier which caused the production of auto-antibodies; Epstein-Barr and CMV are famous for this, and it takes a few years for enough damage to take place th…

Apparently the flu can trigger it too.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#102
post #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.

I'm certain in the sample of patients most GPs see, hypochondriacs are overrepresented, but that really does not in any way eliminate the problems I experience, so from my point of view it's still a real concern.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#103
post #96

Not sure how widely known this is, but recent studies have shown great, sustained results for type 2 through dietary interventions using wholegrain oat (as it contains beta-glucan): https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/html/10.10... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221479931...

Type 2 has had a high correlation with obesity and high carb diets.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#104
post #56
post #4

The fat thing mentioned in the post: fat seems to slow down absorption in my experience, though not to the extreme that some self-described “body hackers” (who don’t have DM) seem to think. I basically consider my malfunctioning pancreas to have been replaced/augmented by my brain, assisted by a cgm. My diet is rather boring but keeps me alive and keeps the BG in a pretty tight range. My biggest problems are hypo (us…

I've never had DKA in 12 years. How does it happen? I've been on CGM (Libre/Dexcom) and it's impossible to get high enough values unnoticed to end up with ketoacidosis for me. Even before with sticks, I just measured often enough. Would be really curious to know more how DKA happens to you!

Just living my life in an urban setting it’s never been a problem.

Had a serious episode about a month ago (ketones at 9 mmol/L). I was on a short backpacking trip with some friends: four 15 mile days. I don’t carry a lot of carbs. My pen became hot despite my best efforts.

Had another episode earlier in the year in a similar trip backpacking in the snow — shorter distance, harder work; my meter froze and stopped working so I don’t know BG level. On the second day my pen got “slushy” even though I carried it next to my body/in sleeping bag.

My understanding is that in these cases your liver starts out dumping glycogen into the bloodstream but reserves are exhausted and so you start going into ketosis. I don’t understand the mechanism under which my glucose then hikes — some stress reaction?

This is generally scary for my companions but not for me as I am a bit confused, falling over etc. The only feasible way out was to hike. Fortunately on the first trip we had adequate water access so I drank (and pissed out) about a litre a mile.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#105

>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

AvaloniaUI is nice and a commonly recommended choice nowadays if you are targeting desktop. It is interesting that the author chose to use Elm to describe C# code. If it is their preference, they could have gotten all that with writing the "core" of the project with F#, without having to change examples neither in the actual implementation nor in the blog post (the author does mention F# but not whether they looked i…

Interesting, last time I looked at it, it was early alpha or something, a few years ago.

I wonder how the mobile support is.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#106

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.

Agree - most of the advice is WebMD level.

Anything outside the check list leaves them scratching their head. They’re terrible debuggers.

I had early high blood pressure since high school. Four blood pressure medications, one being a diuretic. Signs of edema.

It’s not like my condition required any complicated diagnostics. I met the checklist.

5 cardiologists 2 nephrologists in my lifetime. Nothing but more pills for treatment. Over two decades.

I had to be the one to research and then ask to see an endocrinologist because I thought it might be hyperaldosteronism. They were dismissive when I asked but reluctantly made the referral.

Yes, it was unilateral hyperaldosteronism. Had my left adrenal gland removed because of it.

And now my BP is much more stable. I still take a couple of BP drugs, but in smaller doses. And my BP is much more normal and stable.

No more wild, 3am ER visits where my BP was 200/120. And I lost about 15 lbs of water weight.

If have long lived resistant hypertension, please ask to see an endocrinologist to get screened for hyperaldosteronism.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#107
post #96

Not sure how widely known this is, but recent studies have shown great, sustained results for type 2 through dietary interventions using wholegrain oat (as it contains beta-glucan): https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/html/10.10... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221479931...

Type 2 has had a high correlation with obesity and high carb diets.

But interestingly also a very high genetic factor with 90% of identical twins both having T2DM (which is greater than that of type 1 which if I remember correctly is 40%)

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#108
post #78

Interesting stuff! I'm a late T1D and there is just so much that subtly influences your blood sugar levels. I adhere to quite a strict diet and adapt my insuline dosage based on not just the carb contents and glycemic load of the meal, but also the starting point / trends I see in my libre readings. If you can predictably consume carbs (and glycemic load) you can also inject early with confidence (or even post-meal i…

I still haven't found a tactful way to bring this up, but have you considered a low- or zero-carb diet? As far as I underdstand it, if you don't eat carbohydrates, you don't require insulin to deal with the spikes, and apart from a few grams in the bloodstream, humans require extremely little to no exogenous carbs. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've looked into this already.

> As far as I underdstand it, if you don't eat carbohydrates, you don't require insulin to deal with the spikes, and apart from a few grams in the bloodstream, humans require extremely little to no exogenous carbs.

To put it bluntly: You don’t understand it.

Type 1 is different from Type 2.

A Type 1 person without insulin will die.

> “I will see that in someone with 0 percent insulin production, they’ll begin to fall ill within 12 to 24 hours after their last insulin injection, depending on its duration of effect. Within 24 to 48 hours, they’ll be in DKA. Beyond that, mortal outcomes would likely occur within days to perhaps a week or two. But I could not see someone surviving much longer than that.”

https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/ask-dmine-lifespan-s...

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#109
post #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.

Health anxiety high enough to prompt doctor visits is itself a serious issue that the medical system fails to help with.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#110
post #96

Not sure how widely known this is, but recent studies have shown great, sustained results for type 2 through dietary interventions using wholegrain oat (as it contains beta-glucan): https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/html/10.10... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221479931...

Looked at the first paper. I have significant concerns that, frankly, I didn't finish reading.

1. Small sample size, 4. Cont. Because people rarely intentionally make themselves feel like crap- which you will with uncontrolled type II. The hospital stay, its exposure to allegedly* diabetic friendly foods, and subsequent time for the subjects to realize "I feel better, I like this!" Basically invalidates the entire paper.

* allegedly, because I just got out of a hospital with a fantastic cafeteria. But, the "diabetic menu" had way to many items with high glycemic indexes, and nothing to maintain a steady sugar level until the next meal.

Finally: ''HbA1c was lower four weeks after the oatmeal intervention.''

Two days of fasting won't change an A1c value.

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