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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