Diabetes Medication

Berberine might be the best supplement that you can take to reduce your blood glucose. But first you need to consider the disadvantages of any supplement.

Berberine has apparently been an important herbal remedy in Chinese medicine for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Now, it is becoming increasingly well known in the West.

Growing interest in berberine

The U.S. National Library of Medicine indexes about 4,000 studies in professional journals that include berberine. This is far more than the 800 on bitter melon and the 200 on gymnema sylvestre, which quite a few people have told me they use to manage their blood glucose. It’s clear that interest in berberine is growing fast: more than 1,500 of the 4,000 studies were published in the last five years.

But people use berberine for many conditions. Just 243 of these studies are about berberine and diabetes, and 79 of them are human studies (the others are studies of berberine in animals or in test tubes).

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Metformin and 18 brand-name drugs that include it are safe for millions of people with diabetes who have reduced kidney function. This month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a drug safety communication that will let at least 2.5 million more Americans who have this disease use this diabetes drug.

In addition to metformin itself, which is a generic drug, it remains available as Glucophage, the original brand name. Other brands of metformin that the FDA’s decision affects include Actoplus Met, Avandamet, Glucovance, and Janumet.

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Diabetes isn’t especially expensive because it causes nothing. But uncontrolled diabetes can be one of the most expensive diseases anybody can get.

The visits you have to make to your doctor, the blood glucose meters that you require to check your level, and the prescription medications that most people with diabetes need are only a small part of the economic costs of diabetes.  But all together, these essential components of diabetes management were just one-third of the estimated direct costs of diagnosed diabetes in 2012, the most recent year for which we have data.

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You can avoid the worst consequences of diabetes if you take insulin soon after a doctor tells you that you have the disease, recent studies show. You can even drive your diabetes into remission and preserve the beta cell function of your pancreas that you otherwise could lose. When your beta cells don’t work well, it’s even harder to manage your diabetes.

While everyone who has type 1 diabetes has to take insulin, of course, only one-fourth of people with type 2 diabetes do so far, usually after years of failure on oral diabetes drugs. After you have tried one of them after another, and your blood glucose is still too high, people may have to go on insulin, although usually with reluctance. You still hear people with diabetes telling you with pride, “I don’t have to take insulin.”

Shape Up

Even worse is that some doctors even use it as a threat, saying something like, “If you don’t shape up, I’m going to make you inject insulin.” But by that time most of the beta cells of your pancreas that store and release your own body’s insulin into the bloodstream have also failed.

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Credit: NDEI.org

You will probably gain weight when you take most diabetes medicines to help you manage your blood glucose level. This in turn makes your diabetes harder to manage. But one relatively new class of diabetes medicine will often help you to lose weight.

Most people who have diabetes need to lose weight. More than 85 percent of adults with diabetes were overweight in the U.S. government’s Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. And 54.8 percent of the adults with diabetes were obese.

The shining exception to this sad story is a relatively new type or class of drugs that helps those of us who have type 2 diabetes to reduce our blood glucose level and at the same time also helps us to lose weight. These drugs have the technical name “glucagon-like peptide receptor agonists.” Because this is a mouthful, we often call them GLP-1 agonists or incretin mimetics.

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You can get the best control over your diabetes by taking insulin until you are ready to go on a very low-carb diet. But if you have type 2 diabetes, you may have always thought that taking insulin was something you used when everything else failed to manage your blood glucose level.

“If you don’t shape up, I’m going to make you inject insulin,” is a threat we may hear from our doctors. How about turning the table on your doctor and ask for it yourself?

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