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You can’t feel it when you lose the ability to feel your feet. When I put it this way, it sounds obvious. But, A study of 1,100 people with diabetes aged 61 or more found that more than 90 percent of them were unaware of it.
When you lose feeling in your feet, you have neuropathy, the most common complication of diabetes. The National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse says that between 60 and 70 percent of us have a form of it.
We seem to have been successful in using hyperbaric oxygen therapy for more than 40 years. Yet we still don’t know if it works and for what conditions.
Many of our doctors use it to cure chronic diabetic foot ulcers that otherwise could lead to amputation. Since these ulcers are a common complication of diabetes, and when you lose a foot your life will be so seriously impacted, this therapy, known as HBOT, is something we need to carefully consider.
I have been convinced that the use of hyperbaric oxygen might offer many benefits ever since I visited an 82-year-old man named John Erb in Costa Rica two years ago. He is an expatriate American who took me inside his hyperbaric oxygen chamber and showed me to what he attributes his strength. I took the photo below, as I wrote in my photo essay “Rancho Naturalista,” the fantastic ecolodge that he owns.
Your painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy can mean that you have a low level of vitamin D. But when you get enough vitamin D3, you might feel a lot better.
If you have had diabetes for a few years, you probably have neuropathy, because this is perhaps the most common complication of diabetes, striking more than half of us. You probably know if you have it, either from chronic pain or because a doctor told you.
The drugs that are approved to reduce the pain of diabetic peripheral neuropathy are expensive. But your doctor can prescribe much less costly drugs that might save you thousands of dollars and may work equally well.
No drugs do anything more than cut the pain. To reverse the neuropathy, you have to act.
If you have a dental infection and diabetes, you can never get your blood sugar stabilized. I know this from my personal experience and from listening to Richard K. Bernstein, M.D.
Any infection will wreck havoc with our blood sugar management. But dental infections may be some of the most common infections. They can also be insidious, as I know all too well.
The typical dental infection is probably gum disease, which our dentists call periodontal disease. But root canal infections, known as endodontic or endodontal infections, can go undetected even by the best dentists. I know, because my dentist didn’t find mine for about a year.
What’s wrong with you if you have diabetes along with mood fluctuations, if you are anxious, if you often get angry, and if you have a poor memory? Are you just a bad person?
Did you even consider that you might have an underactive thyroid gland? Lots of people have this condition, which doctors call hypothyroidism. And even a greater proportion of people with diabetes have it. I’m one of them.
Few doctors ever check us to see if our thyroid gland is working properly. Even fewer treat it because of inconsistent standards regarding what a healthy thyroid is.
Dr. Kesavadev (right) and Me (Photo by Gopika Krishnan)
But one doctor who runs a large diabetes clinic has been concerned for years about hypothyroidism among his patients. I met him three years ago in San Diego at the Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association. He is Jothydev Kesavadev, M.D., of Jothydev’s Diabetes and Research Center in Trivandrum, India, which is also known as Thiruvananthapuram and is the capital of the state of Kerala located on the west coast of India near the extreme south of the country.