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…
Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
271–280 of 372 posts
Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
#272Earlier 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.
Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
#273What 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…
Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
#274I'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…
Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
#275Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
#276It'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
#277It'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…
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
#278Why 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 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
#279Earlier 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…
Re: Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands
#280Earlier 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…
> 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.