Clicking this link is almost like being swept off to a theme park. The theme: the innovations that have come through almost a century to help manage type 1 diabetes.

First, the link will ask you to enter your birthday to see what was going on when you were diagnosed. It led me to a picture I remember still of early insulin pumps that were the size of a backpack, above.

While JDRF launched this I’m sure to raise funds, I appreciate it as well to be grateful for all we have today. Glucometers, which I didn’t have the first 10 years of my diabetes life, CGMs, faster insulins, no longer having to snack for your shot and a short window before we have an automated artificial pancreas.

While I don’t expect a cure in my lifetime, I do expect more and more ease living with T1D. Maybe one day I’ll barely remember I have it. Let’s hope that’s due to innovations, not dementia.

Adam Brown above

I just read Adam Brown’s unfortunate, and wonderful, review of his recent hospital stay, “My Appendix Ruptured: Scary Lessons Learned About Diabetes in the Hospital.” Adam has type 1 diabetes, is a patient-expert and works for diaTribe. In other words, he knows diabetes inside-out.

He went into the hospital with appendicitis that turned into a ruptured appendix during surgery. It also turned into a horror show of 4 days in hospital with doctors wanting to give him more than two times the amount of insulin he needed, an IV drip full with high amounts of sugar, a hospital full of nurses who’ve never heard of a continuous glucose monitor and diabetes ignorance and standards that put any patient with diabetes at risk. All this at one of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals.

You owe it to yourself to read the post. And you owe it to yourself to have an advocate should you ever be in the hospital, and to expect to continue your own care if you manage your diabetes well and know what you’re doing.

I have long told my husband if I ever go into the hospital, “You must make sure I can manage my diabetes on my own.” What a sad statement that going into the hospital with diabetes can worsen your health.

My friend and fellow T1D, Naturopath Doctor Jody Stanislaw, has launched her YouTube T1D channel. What will you find? Two to three minutes videos of Jody sharing a tip or technique for good d-management and a growing library of twenty minute interviews with other T1D advocates and patient experts like Ginger Vieira and Christel Oerum.

It’s an easy watch, nice to pop into the community, and you just might learn something. In fact I learned something this morning. Now if I could only remember what it was 😉

Today my interview with Susan Weiner, MS, RDN, CDE, CDN, was published in Endocrine Today. It centers on what changes when we aim to help people with diabetes flourish with the condition, and how to do it.

Excerpt:

(HCPs) are often inspired and find it (the Flourishing Approach) both innovative and common sense. I’ve presented the approach worldwide and facilitated workshops in the U.S., including at the American Association of Diabetes Educators annual conference and American Diabetes Association chapter conferences. After I described the approach in Bangalore, India, a dietitian came running up to me after her patient left. Almost giddy, she said, “My patient and I couldn’t stop smiling the whole visit. For the first time I didn’t push him like I usually do, and he’s eager to take the next step he himself came up with.”

As health care moves increasingly toward industrial care – standards, mechanistic, averages, big data and rushed – we need to remember that people are not machines. Patients do best when they feel safe and connected to their health professionals.

My dearest hope is that we begin to move back to embrace those “old-fashioned” values of truly seeing each other, listening and demonstrating our caring.

The very talented Haidee contributed many of her amazingly snarky cartoons to my last book, Diabetes Do’s & How-To’s, action steps to help you manage diabetes around food, fitness, medicine and attitude.

While creating the book, Haidee shared with me a number of cartoons that aren’t in the book. You’ll find them, and/or tons like them in Haidee’s books, FingerPricks and One Lump Or Two?

Looking them over again, I just wanted to share a few. Because I do believe we must take time to laugh in order to keep on keepin’ on with this never-ending condition we live with. Enjoy.

Like the many alternative MDs, nutritionists and dietary investigative journalists I follow, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, cardiologist and author, chants the same mantra: We got nutrition and chronic illness wrong. LDL cholesterol is not responsible for heart attacks, sugar and insulin resistance are, and statins are no wonder drug.

As a cardiologist his primary focus is heart disease. He relates a story of when he worked in the ER and doctors, himself included, put patients with heart attacks on statins before they even rolled them into the operating room. Now says Malhotra, it’s clear, statins benefit few and cause muscle aches and fatigue for many.

You can see this very informative interview between Malhotra and Dr. Mark Hyman, including their conversation about medical bias, in this episode of Hyman’s series, The Doctor’s Pharmacy. 

It really struck me how vulnerable we are as patients not knowing what to believe from our doctors, the government, the media.

A central focus of Malhotra’s work is as a champion of transparency in medicine. His conversation with Hyman, as I said, about how unreliable and biased the medical research that gets translated into the medical guidelines doctors follow, is frightening.

“Only approximately seven percent of clinical studies for medical therapies fulfill criteria for being both high quality and relevant to patients,” said Malhotra. Hyman returned with, “JAMA published an article that only ten percent of cardiology guidelines are based on good science.”

All to say, where does that leave us patients? More than ever you must do the research yourself and choose what you think makes sense for you.

I am only somewhat comforted by the fact that more respected doctors and journalists are exposing much of medical and nutritional science that has long been suppressed. We are finally reaching a tipping point where it is more available and more discussed, and being taken seriously.

I don’t know how they do it. I do know the ZenoBar’s co-founders Russell Long and Susan Papuga were kind enough to send me a sample of their bar in three flavors: Cocoa Hemp, Almond Hemp and Strawberry Hemp. I’ve only tasted the Cocoa Hemp bar so far.

I gave the Strawberry one to a friend who also has type 1 diabetes and blew in from Kansas City last week to attend the UN conference on non-communicable diseases. Outside of the boozy receptions, and the dinner I made her, I think she was only living on bars.

Me, I don’t really do bars. My life is not that unpredictable and I prefer eating food. But I came home late last night from Connecticut and it was 8:45 PM before I rustled up a salad for dinner, so I ate a third of the Cocoa Hemp bar.

It was good. Moist, chewy, richly flavorful. And, it appears to be true: it barely, if at all, nudged my blood sugar up. On the label the Cocoa Hemp bar says 25 grams of carb with 10 grams of dietary fiber.

Susan and Russell say there’s only 2-4 net carbs in a bar. Truly low glycemic, you won’t ride the “roller-coaster” of up and down blood sugar, you’ll enjoy stable energy and lovely ingredients like almonds and hazelnuts, chia, flax and hemp seeds, cocoa and or organic fruit and the sweetness comes from allulose, a sugar found in figs and corn.

Check out their web site. It’s fun, colorful and you’ll meet these lovely inventors and likely learn something.

Remaining bar reflects slightly less than half. The husband stole a bite.