Since three-fourths of those of us who have diabetes also have high blood pressure, a combined blood glucose and blood pressure monitoring device makes a lot of sense. Years ago I reviewed basic devices here, but now we have the
chance to use something that seems to approach the sophistication of the devices that nurses regularly use in doctors’ offices. And is probably even better.

The Fora D20 has a regular arm cuff attached to the device that measures either our BG or our BP. This gives me more confidence than the basic devices that previously were all that we had for monitoring our blood pressure at home.

I don’t automatically assume that doctors and their nurses can take better care of our medical needs than we can ourselves. Clearly, we have a greater interest in our own health.

But with blood pressure testing even more considerations come into play. We can do it better at home.

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My feet were cold most of the time. Even when I wore thick woollen socks to bed my feet were often so uncomfortable that they interfered with my sleep.
Since I have diabetes, I assumed that my problem was that I had one of the most common complications of our condition, peripheral neuropathy. So I focused all the more on controlling my blood glucose level in hopes of reversing my problem some day.Good strategy in general. But worse than useless when the assumption is faulty. My problem is hypothyroidism. This means that my thyroid gland isn’t active enough in producing certain important hormones. One of the early symptoms is increased sensitivity to cold.

I also had a couple more of the early symptoms — I had a slow heart rate and my skin was dry and itchy. This is because the hypothyroidism gives me a slow metabolism, which can explain why I have such a hard time maintaining my weight loss. I can hardly eat anything without gaining weight!

But different people have different symptoms, and some people don’t have any of them. “Hypothyroidism is more common than you would believe, and millions of people are currently hypothyroid and don’t know it,” says James Norman, M.D., on EndocrineWeb.

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My friend Jay has type 2 diabetes and is a member of the diabetes support group that meets every month in my apartment. But he is also a primary care physician, and almost half his patients have diabetes.

Jay is therefore uniquely qualified to help us. At the most recent meeting of our support group we were already  running overtime. But it was Jay’s turn to speak, and he wanted to share with us the “shock treatment” that he uses with his new patients who have diabetes. I’m glad that he did and that I can share this treatment with you.

Jay starts by explaining that diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease are the three main silent killers. Because they usually don’t offer us any advance warning of the hidden damage that they do to our bodies, these diseases are truly insidious.

Then, he suddenly turns off the lights in the windowless office. “Visualize yourself 15 years from now,” he says. “This is what you might be seeing then, if you don’t control your diabetes.”

This is Jay’s shock treatment. But any technique that will get us to open our eyes to the consequences of uncontrolled diabetes is better than none, he says.

Jay asked each of the members of our support group to look in the mirror each morning and visualize ourselves 15 years later. For me this gave me one more piece of encouragement to eat right, stay slim, and exercise so I will still be able to see my face in the mirror 15 years from now when I will be 90. If I’m still around then, I hope to continue seeing a computer monitor so I that I will still be able to write you.

As Jay left my apartment that day, I took him aside and told him that I already could visualize his shock treatment. My ophthalmologist had just told me after my semiannual checkup that I have two small micro-aneurysms in my left eye that he hadn’t seen before.

Jay’s shock treatment worked especially well because I was already shocked. Micro-aneurysms can lead to diabetic retinopathy, which can, of course, lead to blindness, the complication of diabetes that I have always dreaded the most.

Now I have even more incentive to keep my A1C level in the low 5 range, if not down to 4.5, which is my goal. I hope that you don’t need any more incentives to control your own diabetes.

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.

With all the ways that we have now to treat fatty liver disease I don’t understand why any of us still have it. Yet most people with diabetes suffer from this potentially dangerous condition.

Now we have yet another tool in our arsenal against fatty liver disease. It’s a strange one. Not strange as in being unfamiliar, but rather strange as being surprising.

The new tool that may reverse fatty liver disease is vitamin E.

Years ago I had fatty liver disease myself. My late wife had it too. I was able to reverse it, but for her it eventually progressed to cirrhosis of the liver, which killed her three years ago.

Sadly, we didn’t know then how serious fatty liver disease could be and about all the ways to avoid it. I’ve written here how milk thistle and metformin can help. So too can eating a diet high in omega-3 fats. Exercise certainly works, as I know from my own experience. Even a little exercise helps.

The latest word on potential treatments for fatty liver disease saw the light of day a week ago in the advance online edition of The New England Journal of Medicine. Many people consider this the world’s leading medical journal. As of today only the abstract is free online, although I was able to download the full-text yesterday. The NEJM plans to publish the study in the printed journal tomorrow.

Researchers found that vitamin E improved the livers of people who had nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which lay people like us know as fatty liver disease. In the study 247 adults with advanced fatty liver disease were randomly assigned to take vitamin E or a placebo (dummy pills) for nearly two years. They found that 43 percent of those treated with vitamin E showed significant improvement in their liver, while only 19 percent of those who received a placebo got better.

The dose was 800 IU of the natural form of vitamin E. The specific form was “RRR-α-tocopherol (formerly known as d-α-tocopherol) vitamin E,” according to the full-text of the research report. [Read more →]

Our mouths are key to diabetes control. And not just what we put in them.

How would you like to reduce your A1C level by 0.67 percent — like from 6.67 to 6.0 — without putting less in your mouth or even increasing your exercise? This third type of A1C control may be the easiest ever.

Research presented at last month’s Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association that I attended in San Francisco made this point. Dr. George Taylor, associate professor of dentistry at the University of Michigan, reported there on recent studies demonstrating the association between periodontal problems and the complications of diabetes. He spoke in the first symposium ever by dentists to ADA meetings.

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