If you use a blood glucose meters from one of the big four meter companies to check your level four times a day, you will probably pay anywhere from $1,700 to $2,300 each year. But if instead you test with a meter and strips from one of the “big box” stores, you would be out of pocket only about $600 to $800.

This is a useful bit of information from the latest Consumer Reports review of the “Best Blood Glucose Meters.” The magazine rates 21 meters in a brief article of one chart and five paragraphs in less than a page in its November 2012 issue.

The big box stores that sell some of the least expensive meters and test strips are Wal-Mart and Target. Wal-Mart has offered its ReliOn brand for years, but Target now offers its Up & Up brand.

Still, the wide price gap may be misleading. Each of the big four — LifeScan, Roche, Bayer, and Abbott — offer programs that can provide some of us test strips for considerably less.

Most people with diabetes will find the report, however brief, useful. It’s already on newsstands and, better yet, on the shelves of most libraries.

What Consumer Reports says is important. Published by the nonprofit Consumers Union and containing no ads, this is one of our largest circulation magazines. Two years ago it had a circulation of 7.3 million copies, according to a review of the magazine in The Wall Street Journal.

The magazine regularly reviews these meters, the most important tool that we have for managing our blood sugar. Four years ago I wrote here about its review of 13 meters from eight different manufacturers.

[Read more →]

An outbreak of fungal meningitis has killed five people who took tainted steroid injections for back pain. And 42 more in seven states are sick, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of them are in Tennessee, but others are in Virginia, Michigan, Indiana, Maryland, Florida, and North Carolina.

But what connection does this bad news have to those of us who have diabetes?

The connection is that we already had other reasons to avoid steroid injections when we can. Steroids can cause our blood sugar levels to skyrocket. They can make us ravenously hungry and lead to our gaining weight.

Prednisone is one of the most commonly prescribed steroids. It is a corticosteroid, not one of the anabolic steroids that bodybuilders use. Our doctors prescribe prednisone because it can reduce or relieve severe inflammation. At the same time steroids have profound effects on all of our body.

These side effects can be serious. One friend of mine joined the diabetes support group that I started because he had severe back pain, took the prednisone that relieved it, and ended up with type 2 diabetes.

Prednisone and other steroids are powerful drugs that really work. Unfortunately, they can come with very high costs. It matters a lot how much you take and for how long.

When we take any powerful drug like prednisone we have to work with our doctors to make the choices that can minimize the side effects so that we get the benefits with the least possible risk. Be in charge of your body.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Diabetes is usually one of the most expensive diseases we could get. But it doesn’t have to be.

If we didn’t have diabetes, the amount that we would have to spend for healthcare would be a lot less. Specifically, diabetes costs us about 2.3 times as much in medical expenditures as it does for people who don’t have it, according to the American Diabetes Association. And that doesn’t even consider the lost income from losing work because of diabetes.

But that’s money under the dam. We’ve got diabetes and we’ve got to figure out how to live with it within our means.

The trick is to manage our diabetes so it doesn’t manage our life. Easier said than done, of course, but it’s certainly possible.

[Read more →]

When I moved to Colorado in 2004, one of my problems was finding a whole new set of doctors. In addition to a primary care physician, I had to find an ophthalmologist, a dermatologist, a podiatrist, a chiropractor, a dentist, and other specialists for passing problems. I didn’t even try to find an endocrinologist here. I can remember at least 20 doctors who treated me in the past eight years.

Ever since I began to manage my diabetes I have been extraordinarily healthy. So that’s not why I am so familiar with doctor’s offices. All of us who have diabetes need a primary care physician and some of these specialists. The main reason why I kept changing doctors was because I didn’t like a lot of them.

Finally, I like all of them who I go to now. I even count two of them, my primary care physician and my chiropractor, as personal friends. My current medical team consists of six essential doctors.

[Read more →]

Dr. Tim Reid asked me a couple of days ago why I was so numbers driven. I had just spoken at a meeting of diabetes professionals about my success in bringing my weight between February 2006 and May 2008 from 312 pounds, which is a body mass index of 39.5, to 156 pounds, a BMI of 19.8. Today after a nine-hour hike in the mountains yesterday it is even a little lower, 154 pounds, a BMI of 19.5.

Dr. Reid  treats patients at the Mercy Diabetes Center in Janesville, Wisconsin. He also serves as the chairman of the Department of Family Practice for Mercy Health System.

At the meeting I had also told him and the other members of the group how I brought down my A1C level from 14.4 when a doctor first told me in February 1994 that I have type 2 diabetes. Now it is 5.1.

But I fumbled at answering Dr. Reid’s question. Admitting that I am not an engineer with the engineering mentality that delights in numbers, when he asked me why these numbers were so important to me, I didn’t have an answer on the tip of my tongue.

[Read more →]

Losing weight can be easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times.

Mark Twain actually said that about stopping smoking. But losing weight and stopping smoking have a big difference.

When you stop smoking, you stop. When you lose weight, you still have to eat something. This makes losing weight even harder to do than to stop smoking.

But, you might think, that to stop smoking is harder because tobacco is addicting. So you think that you aren’t addicted to the food you eat?

Wheat is Addicting

If you eat wheat in any form, you probably are addicted to it. Wheat, which is almost everyone’s dietary staple, contains opioids.

[Read more →]

Diabetes doesn’t hurt. That’s one of the biggest problems we have in taking this insidious disease seriously.

But when we don’t manage our diabetes, some of its complications can be painful. And about 40 percent of us have acute or chronic pain. That’s the bad news.

This bad news comes to us in a new study of more than 13,000 adults with type 2 diabetes in the Kaiser Permanente, Northern California system. About 42 percent of them reported that they had acute pain and about 40 percent said their pain was chronic. The most common complication they mentioned was fatigue, about 25 percent, followed by neuropathy, about 24 percent.

The findings, “Symptom Burden of Adults with Type 2 Diabetes Across the Disease Course: Diabetes & Aging Study,” will appear in the Journal of General Internal Medicine and is now available online. The lead author is Rebecca L. Sudore, M.D., and her assistant sent me a copy of the full-text.

[Read more →]

Those people who don’t have diabetes yet take the crunchiness of their food for granted. Who doesn’t eat tons of potato chips, corn chips, and nachos?

Those of us who need to manage our diabetes, that’s who. The most popular of the crunchy foods are high in carbohydrates that quickly raise our blood sugar levels a lot.

But just because we have diabetes doesn’t mean that we stop loving the crunch factor in our foods. Fortunately, some crunchy foods are low enough in carbohydrates that they won’t literally do a number on our blood sugar.

[Read more →]

We have many tips and tactics on how those of us who have diabetes can get down to a healthy weight and then keep off those pounds. I have written about many of them here, and each of them probably help some of us some of the time.

Like just about everyone else who has diabetes, I have struggled most of my life with my weight. So many of us are overweight, in fact, that one government study that I have cited here several times says that more than 85 percent of all people with diabetes — including both type 1s and type 2s — have an unhealthy body mass index of 25 or more. This compares with the one-third of all Americans who are overweight. And for us being overweight is not only much more common but it also makes it much harder to control our blood sugar level.

I was able to shed most of those unneeded pounds starting in 2006 when I started taking Byetta. The next year, when I wanted to stay thin without any diabetes drugs, I lost even more weight when I switched to a very low-carb diet.

Losing that weight was one of the hardest things I ever did. But keeping it off proved to be even harder. I eventually set my goal to get down to a BMI of 19.5, the low end of the normal range, and actually reached it from time to time. But as I wrote here a year ago, after my weight increased when I took a cruise on a small ship, I simply failed at maintaining the weight I wanted to have.

[Read more →]

Young people in America today are getting type 2 diabetes much younger than their parents ever did. The media is ringing its collective hands over concern that this terrible trend will continue.

Even the good, gray New York Times is worried. “Obesity and the form of diabetes linked to it are taking an even worse toll on America’s youths than medical experts had realized,” Denise Grady, a Times science reporter, wrote earlier this year. In the 1990s doctors began to notice an “alarming increase” in type 2 diabetes among children, especially among those from poorer families.

When I began to write about diabetes in the mid-1990s we had a good reason for calling what we now call type 2 diabetes “adult-onset diabetes.” When a doctor told me in 1994 that I had it, I was 59, which was then the typical age of diagnosis. Now even children  as young as 5 get type 2.

[Read more →]