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Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

martin.janiczek.cz

291–300 of 372 posts

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#291
post #231

I'm prediabetic with two T2 parents and a T2 grandparent and my primary care doctor is entirely unconcerned about it. My lowish tech solution to delay (and hopefully prevent!) the onset of T2 is to use a glucose monitor every 2 hours, every day, and create a database of foods with my postprandial blood sugar reaponse at 1.5 and 2 hours. I also keep track of how exercise affects my blood sugar. Over the last couple ye…

Is it conclusively proven that glucose spikes influence the risk of T2D by a big margin? Like imo calorie balance is more influential than glucose spike. This is all assuming that you are currently healthy. I don't think spiking blood glucose is a good idea of you are diabetic

There is no conclusive proof that occasional blood glucose spikes by themselves significantly increase the risk of T2D. In particular we know that the stress hormones produced during high intensity exercise cause temporary spikes by stimulating glucose release from the liver. But we have fairly good evidence that such exercise actually decreases the risk of T2D. Insulin resistance seems to be triggered more by chronic elevation of blood glucose and not clearing the spikes quickly enough.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is naked political activism that clearly breaks the HN guidelines and offers zero informational content, intellectual gratification, or other value to me or anyone else here. Please don't put stuff like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Can you please elaborate on what the political activism in the above comment is?

The long list of statements carefully chosen to maximize emotion with minimal information transfer, followed by

> I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad.

> So I am not surprised to see this, and expect to see more of it.

...which is a clearly political call for "someone to do something", using extremely emotionally charged language with zero (negative?) utility such as "pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just".

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, there are few things a GP can do better than a nurse or some technician with an LLM, and the sooner that shift happens, the better for society.

It will be interesting when LLMs can do more to advance general public health more than the entire medical system in recent history.

What do you think that LLMs can do exactly? Sometimes naive technologists think of AI as some sort of magic solution. But if you look at overall healthcare system costs, very little is being spent in areas that could be easily automated with an LLM.

And for T1D specifically it would be very dangerous to put an LLM in control of something like an insulin pump considering that we don't have any way to do quality assurance to the level required. Simple, deterministic algorithms are preferred for safety critical systems because they're less likely to fail in bizarre or unpredictable ways.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#294
post #257

I had a very similar experience with eosenophilic esophogitis (EoE). It's an allergic reaction that causes your esophagus to constrict resulting in acute dysphagia (difficulty swallowing). It can get extremely unpleasant for me as well as anyone around me when an attack happens. The problem is that the latency between eating the food that triggers it and actual symptoms is many many hours, and the symptoms only appea…

I get empty gelcaps from amazon and local nutrition food stores. They cost like $5 for between 100-1000. You can get them in a wide variety of sizes, though you might have trouble if you're looking for something larger than size "000" (1cm diameter, 2.6cm length). Here is a size chart[0] (but there are cheaper sources for the gelcaps). 0: https://ibspot.com/products/capsuline-size-1-empty-capsules-...

Yeah I actually tried that but could not figure out an efficient way to fill them.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#295
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get empty gelcaps from amazon and local nutrition food stores. They cost like $5 for between 100-1000. You can get them in a wide variety of sizes, though you might have trouble if you're looking for something larger than size "000" (1cm diameter, 2.6cm length). Here is a size chart[0] (but there are cheaper sources for the gelcaps). 0: https://ibspot.com/products/capsuline-size-1-empty-capsules-...

Yeah I actually tried that but could not figure out an efficient way to fill them.

Would want a capsule filling tray. The opening of the large portions of the capsules are positioned at the same level as the flat surface so you can just pile up a bunch of sugar or starch or whatever and use a scraper to level it all off, then assemble the tops of each capsule.

https://www.pennherb.com/cap-m-quik-capsule-filler-F7B

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#296
A little tangential to the discussion and anecdotal, but I hope this can generate some discussion.

I've found different types of exercise affects my insulin response differently. I have T1D, had it for a little over 20 years. I've noticed that high-intensity short-duration exercises (hill climbs on/off bikes, burpees) have me requiring noticeably lesser insulin (both basal and bolus) for the same carb/calorie intake. This effect lasts for a couple of days, before gradually reverting back. I'm fairly active and play a few sports every other day for about an hour or two at the most, but none of them (in isolation), except for soccer, have shown similar effects.

Another curious effect I've noticed is great sleep (>= 8 hours) and managing my stress levels (which goes hand in hand with sleep quality) helps increase insulin sensitivity even further, but not overly so if I haven't been active over the previous few days.

Have any other T1Ds noticed something similar?

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#297

What I've learned that, as an adult in 2024 in the United States, you cannot take for granted: - That your medical professionals are acting in your best interest - That your insurance company is acting in your best interest - That your medical professional knows what they are talking about - That things that are legal to put in your body will not cause irreparable harm to you - That the legal level of pollutants in t…

>I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad I think the problem is that you were raised to think that a "good and just" world is one where there is no risk, no variability, and limited self-reliance. This is a fiction and has never ex…

> Everything beyond nothing is an imperfect and unstable solution held together with duct-tape.

What a depressing worldview... :(

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad I think the problem is that you were raised to think that a "good and just" world is one where there is no risk, no variability, and limited self-reliance. This is a fiction and has never ex…

> Everything beyond nothing is an imperfect and unstable solution held together with duct-tape. What a depressing worldview... :(

I'd challenge you to attack it logically on it's merits. I think parent poster is obvipusly right, civilization exists on a precipice at all times. The natural state of the universe is toward entropy.

That's not to say we can't make it better, just that we should have no illusions about its stability.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything beyond nothing is an imperfect and unstable solution held together with duct-tape. What a depressing worldview... :(

I'd challenge you to attack it logically on it's merits. I think parent poster is obvipusly right, civilization exists on a precipice at all times. The natural state of the universe is toward entropy. That's not to say we can't make it better, just that we should have no illusions about its stability.

Lots of folks on the internet misunderstand entropy.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad I think the problem is that you were raised to think that a "good and just" world is one where there is no risk, no variability, and limited self-reliance. This is a fiction and has never ex…

> Everything beyond nothing is an imperfect and unstable solution held together with duct-tape. What a depressing worldview... :(

I dont think it is depressing. I think it is marvelous and a testament to human engineering, perseverance, and collective spirit that we hold things together.

As I said down thread, it is something to be grateful for, given that we are always one major catastrophe away from robbing and killing each other in the street.

While sure, things could be better, I think it is overly cynical to consider the status quo garbage. If you wanna see some real garbage, go to Haiti, Donetsk, or Liberia and report back about US society isnt "good and just".

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