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Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

martin.janiczek.cz

271–280 of 372 posts

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#271

I'm T1D and currently working on something like this because diabetes healthcare in the UK is effectively non-existent past diagnosis. Managing the condition isn't too difficult after 30 years of it, but dealing with the politics of NHS diabetes care is astronomically more difficult than it was in any decade previously. In my experience, if you are not pregnant, or you aren't at risk of passing out in the next 15 min…

I think it depends where in the UK you are, as I believe different areas healthcare is run differently. This has not been my experience, I've found the care to be good, as long as I'm willing to put in the work on my side and be proactive on occasion about looking for help. In my local area the diabetic team is stretched thinly (that's what the staff said to me themselves) and I am relatively proactive with reaching out, research and asking questions. With that said they really want me to succeed in keeping in a healthy range and have been a massive support as much as they can. Also the fact I don't have to pay for Insulin or my CGM is something I am really thankful for. Threats of criminal punishments for lazy medical professionals doesn't sound like a good fix to be honest.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#272
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of the American medical system has deteriorated to such a point that if the Doctors are not the grifters they may at least be culpable for enabling the grift.

That hasn't been my experience. I have never experienced or heard of a doctor deceiving or lying in real life. I dont think I can think of an example from hospitals either.

I've had dentists discover that I needed a filling after they found out how good my dental insurance was. Their justification was that the tooth seemed "soft". They never took an X-ray or provide any other data than that.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#273

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…

It took me a long time to get to grips with the fact that you can't even take for granted that your own parents act in your best interest. We were all propagandized with love and kumbaya songs. In reality life is a lot more.. erm let's say self benefit driven with a lot of sprinkles of ego in it. People optimize their language output for their self benefit while actions don't really need to be aligned to get most of those self benefits.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#274

I'm a T1D and I mostly agree with the author. I think this simulation is very interesting. I disagree with the author however on the following point: "injecting insulin ~15min before you start eating would do wonders for neutralizing the BG spike, the issue is, nobody does it, because what if you then get a smaller serving at the restaurant or it gets delayed?" My doc told me the same, which I think is insane. "Here…

Same here, or more often I'll just wait to start eating if it comes early. I was selfconsious about it at first but staying in range is more important to me than any awquard feeling saying "please start, I just need to wait a few minutes", no one ever makes a fuss.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#276
It's kind of sad how slow some technology progresses. 10 years ago, I thought that by now we'd have self-powered machines which can manufacture insulin inside the body or replace essentially any organ.

It's crazy that we still can't replicate biological processes. Literally a peace of meat can do this stuff but we can't replicate it.

As a software dev, I feel like the industry has slowed to a crawl. Most of the jobs are about building gimmicky software as part of some weird corporate acquisition scheme. There are very few jobs available to build real useful stuff. Those jobs involve taking risks... But private equity firms don't see the point of taking on risks when they can just as easily get risk-free profits.

I find the risk-aversion of private equity firms very weird because at their scale, with their finances, you'd think they could make a large number of risky bets and get relatively predictable results but that's not what they're doing. The alternative approach I'm suggesting clearly works; just look at what happened when companies started investing in AI. The level of risk in that case was off the charts, yet clearly, even that bet paid off. The productivity gains of recent AI innovation are broad and obvious. Why isn't this approach the standard?

If incentives are the issue, we need to reform the socio-economic system to align incentives to prioritize useful innovation. Remove perverse incentives which reward useless schemes. Encourage broad bets, prioritize technical skill. Funding should be easily accessible to skilled tech people and shouldn't be based on social connections or arbitrary metrics of past financial success.

Technical success and financial success rarely align these days because technological alignment with financial schemes is the main determinant of financial success in the tech industry.

A lot of innovation is brushed under the rug. Useful innovations which could have provided a solid foundation to build upon are completely deprived of funding. Almost every useful innovation becomes a dead end.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#277

It's kind of sad how slow some technology progresses. 10 years ago, I thought that by now we'd have self-powered machines which can manufacture insulin inside the body or replace essentially any organ. It's crazy that we still can't replicate biological processes. Literally a peace of meat can do this stuff but we can't replicate it. As a software dev, I feel like the industry has slowed to a crawl. Most of the jobs…

The cell organelles are a bit smaller than microelectronics that we can make with photolithography, aren't they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)#1...

Even though that chart lists semiconductor process nodes as down in the single-digit nanometers, the articles about the semiconductor fabrication say that these are marketing terms and don't refer to the size of actual features produced by the fabrication process, which are apparently an order of magnitude larger or so.

So you could say cells are still doing some incredibly small-scale (yet voluminous) manufacturing, in a wet environment, such that we couldn't directly manufacture devices like that even if we understood all the details of how they work!

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#278

Why does hypoglycemia happen in people with diabetes? Healthy people can stay active for weeks without food and for many years almost without dietary carbs (on just fats and proteins - see carnivore and keto diets). How comes gluconeogenesis from triglyceride glycerol and from amino acid fails to cover the essential glucose needs?

I suspect it happens because of your externally provided insulin (as in, you caused your hypoglycemia by injecting too much). IDK if hypoglycemias happen naturally in T1Ds in situations where they don't in healthy people. I assume that eg. when exercising too much etc., even a healthy person would get a hypoglycemia?

> I assume that eg. when exercising too much etc., even a healthy person would get a hypoglycemia?

I doubt so. I tried water-fasting for a week while exercising a lot and felt great. Fatigue from jogging felt nonexistent as compared to normal (my normal endurance is pretty low). Resistance exercise muscle fatigue felt way stronger (low recovery rate) than normal yet apparently didn't affect the brain as I neither felt sleepy, nor moody nor intellectually impaired.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#279
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am following a WFPB diet with high carbs and reversing my A1C + some other markers. My philosophy is that many diets work, you just can not have a cocktail. Our body is not a hybrid car. It takes time to switch/ Choose what you can live with - high carb, low carb, keto - and stay focused.

There is of course substantial variability in individual patient response to treatments. But a high-carb diet is unlikely to work out well for someone who is already insulin resistant. If that's the only diet that they can live with then their life is likely to be drastically shortened. As for plant based versus animal based diets, we don't have any high quality RCTs to indicate that one or the other has a different…

Sure but 1) there are many of us who are helped by WFPB and 2) Whole Foods plant based != plant based. High carbs was just my paraphrasing of what we do - lots of greens, lots of raw, elimination of meat, oil and sugar. And a bunch of other things. And while it helps reverse a few things, I agree it may not work in some or many scenarios.

Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands

#280
post #267

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…

Honestly, as a society we should be able to guarantee most if not all of those. Every single one of them is an economic trade-off and when you put for profit companies in the loop, it’s obvious that they will prioritize their profits. The system is for profit by choice, it is under our control as society to guarantee that list or not, and we have chosen not to. Might be the right or wrong decision, that’s up to each…

It's beyond economic trade-off. You're talking about full perfect control over people's behaviours.

> That things that are legal to put in your body will not cause irreparable harm to you

You can get water intoxication by literally drinking too much clean water. How are you going to get anywhere close to controlling that?

> That your medical professional knows what they are talking about

You just lost all medical staff, because they're people and people make mistakes. Even when they don't, people are extremely fuzzy puzzles and we don't have enough tests available to do precise diagnosis of lots of things.

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