Diabetes Crisis: Treatment Options
How the ADA, Pharma, & Traditional Health Care Fail Patients
This month's celebrity writer for the Health and Wellness section discusses the real roots of the diabetes epidemic in the US and what to do about it.
The Center for Disease Control predicts that 1 in 3 children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes during his or her lifetime—1 in 2 among certain demographics. Doctors who are proponents of lifestyle medicine, take umbrage with both the efficacy and guidelines espoused by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the self-appointed guardians of diabetes care and education in the United States.
The American Diabetes Association
The ADA’s mission statement is to “cure” diabetes. How well is that plan working? A significant part of the problem is the ADA’s guidelines for the diabetes diagnostic level, its parameters for blood sugar “control,” and its dietary recommendations, all of which are suboptimal, thanks to allegiances to the food industry and pharmaceutical companies who have a monopoly.
For example, the ADA’s recent recommendation to initiate earlier insulin intervention is potentially medically dangerous. A program of increasingly higher doses of insulin causes cellular resistance to the hormone. In addition, too much insulin causes weight gain, and contributes to large blood vessel diseases like heart attacks and strokes.
Medical Training and Patient Time too Brief
The average doctor is also at a disadvantage due to poor practices institutionally reinforced by medical training facilities in three areas: the lack of nutrition education in most medical schools; training that favours health care prognoses based on acute rather than chronic conditions; and out-patient clinic schedules built around 7 minutes of doctor-patient time per visit.
Doctors know that patient health behavior is largely responsible for Type-2 diabetes, but it’s near impossible to deliver meaningful patient education, health behavior coaching, and emotional support in 7 minutes.
Neither a technically proficient medical system nor the diagnostic and therapeutic acumen of physicians will stop diabetes so lifestyle medicine doctors are focusing their primary attention on the patient and his or her own ability to change.
When we design therapeutic interventions that allow the patient to take charge of both health behavior and outcome, we’ll be better able to reverse today’s growing diabetes pandemic.
For more information on diabetes issues see my interview with General Medicine Feature Writer, Anthony Lee, about my co-authorship of The 30-Day Diabetes Miracle, my involvement in the Liftestyle Centre of America, what it takes to turn medical research into health journalism, and my Texas-based practices:
- Metroplex Hospital, now a 237-bed acute-care hospital.
- House/Cross Associates, a long-term nursing care company that has 5 campuses and serves 625 residents.
- House Medical Clinic, an 11-physician multi-specialty medical clinic.
- Big Bend Regional Medical Center Hospital.
