Motivating people with diabetes to control this disease is my goal in life. For most of my life I consciously took in information, but now what gives me the greatest joy is to share it.

But what motivated me to control my own diabetes?

Yesterday afternoon I gave my chiropractor a copy of the article that I wrote here on Chia Seeds, mentioning that many people had read and commented on it. While he was treating me, he said that my articles must help many people to control their diabetes.

Maybe, I acknowledged.  But I’m trying to help just one person at a time. [Read more →]

You need to help me a lot with this one.

All of you who read my articles here are motivated to control your diabetes. Almost all of you have a positive motivation. I doubt if many of you have a primarily negative motivation based on fear of the consequences of uncontrolled diabetes. Negative motivations just don’t keep us doing what we need to do for long.

What are your positive motivations? What do you tell people you know who have diabetes to encourage them to tame it?
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Dr. Richard K. Bernstein knows how to cure diabetes, and researchers are ready to start the research. All they need is money. Does anyone have enough money and care enough about curing diabetes to fund this research? Do you?

Even if you have type 1 diabetes, you almost certainly still have some of your beta cells. If your body stops killing them, they will replicate and produce insulin — and then you will possibly have a cure.

When I talked with Dr. Bernstein a few days ago, he told me that he knows how kill the specific killer T cells. Most famous as the leading proponent of a very low-carb diet, Dr. Bernstein is a diabetologist with a practice near New York City. He was also an engineer before he got in M.D. degree in his 40s.
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We can’t completely trust anything, anyone, or any organization. Nowhere is this more true than for our health.

Yet we have to decide. Doing nothing is impossible.

A correspondent that I know only as “drscll” prompted these reflections. He or she asked if we could trust even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The question startled me at first, because if any part of our government is trustworthy, I’ve always thought that it was the CDC. Staffed by a dedicated group of people, many of whom put their lives on the line to control epidemics, the CDC deals in facts, not opinions or recommendations.
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Seeing your doctor probably costs a lot more than you think. Even if you have health insurance with a minimal co-pay, that’s not the half of it.

If you need to see your endocrinologist every quarter, these costs can really add up. You need to factor in the cost of travel, which can include meals out and even overnight accommodations, particularly if you live a long way from the doctor’s office. If your child is the one with diabetes, one or both parents will need to take off from work.

Until Kevin McMahon, the president and CEO of Diabetech in Dallas, told me about a new online cost calculator I hadn’t realized what a financial burden these doctor visits could be. Kevin just told me about this neat way to help you determine the cost of these visits.
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Once upon a time I knew some people who wanted me to help them set up a charity. They were smart enough to know that they could make a lot of money by establishing a not-for-profit organization that would pay them outrageous salaries.

They said that I could be the vice-president of the charity. While I respected their intelligence, I declined their offer. I decided that I wasn’t as big a scumbag as they were.

However, they weren’t the first scumbags earning big bucks from our charity contributions. The salaries that many heads of charity organizations take home are obscene. And that includes some of our most respected diabetes organizations.
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One of the biggest and most important diabetes trials is well underway. But so far it hasn’t received much attention. That will change

The Look AHEAD trial began in 2001 and is scheduled to conclude in 2012. In it they randomly assigned 5,145 overweight people with type 2 diabetes to either a lifestyle intervention or to enhanced diabetes support and education.

AHEAD is shorthand for Action for Health and Diabetes. We sure like catchy acronyms, don’t we!

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