Diabetes Treatment

All diabetes treatment is aimed at one thing: controlling the level of glucose in the bloodstream. There are a variety of ways to do this, all of which depend on a number of factors: type of diabetes, age at onset, severity of symptoms and glucose level, presence of complicating factors, general health and current lifestyle, and changes the diabetic is willing to make.

The three major categories of treatment are diet, exercise, and medication. In Type 2 diabetes, diet and exercise alone are often all that is necessary to bring blood glucose down to manageable levels. Sometimes oral medication is necessary. Type 1 diabetes is treated with insulin in addition to diet and exercise.
Oral hypoglycemic agents help the body metabolize the glucose obtained from food. These drugs are not insulin, but they do stimulate insulin-producing cells to secrete more insulin, and they help overcome insulin resistance.

Insulin injections, which you learn to give to yourself with a variety of implements, may be combined with an oral hypoglycemic agent, but usually a diabetic who needs insulin takes only insulin. This hormone used to be manufactured from pork and beef, but now most of it is genetically engineered and synthesized, thus more effective in treating human diabetes. Controlling blood cholesterol and blood pressure also are important components of treatment as well.

My Story of Diabetes

There are a number of myths surrounding diet and diabetes, and much of what is still considered sensible nutritional diabetic advice for diabetes can over the long run be fatal. I know, because it almost cost me my life. I developed diabetes in 1991 at a very young age and for more than two decades I was an ordinary diabetic, dutifully following doctor’s orders and leading the most normal life I could, given the limitations of my diabetic disease.

Over the years, the complications from my diabetes became worse and worse, and like may diabetics in similar circumstances, I faced a very early death. I was still alive, but the quality of my life wasn’t particularly good. I have what is known as type 1 diabetes or insulin dependent, diabetes, which usually begins in childhood (it’s also called juvenile-onset diabetes). Type 1 diabetes must take daily insulin injections just to stay alive.

Years ago in the dark ages of diabetes treatment, most had to sterilize needles and glass syringes by boiling them every day, and use a test tube to test the urine for sugar. Many of the tools the diabetic can take for granted today were scarcely dreamed of back then-there was no such thing as a rapid, finger-stick blood sugar-measuring device, nor disposable insulin syringes. Still, even today parents of Type 1 diabetics have to live with the same fear my parents lived with. For any parent of a type 1 diabetic, this is a real and constant possibility.