I’m being a little cheeky about ‘malfunction,’ but let me provoke your thinking. This is a typical blood glucose report for me from Dexcom’s app, Clarity. The app is on my iPhone and I see this weekly when it arrives as an email.

Yes, I’m typically above 90% in range. I’m not boasting. My high time in range is the result of eating a low carb diet, walking everyday, and wearing and responding to my numbers on my Dexcom CGM. Routine, for me is a major tool managing my blood glucose: eating the same type of foods, eating about the same time of day, walking an hour a day usually at the same time, checking my blood glucose frequently, if it’s going higher than I like I take more insulin, if I see I’m going to crash in 20 minutes, I grab a glucose tablet or honey, whatever’s needed. You get the idea. I’m disciplined, pay attention, do the work, and the regularity of routine reduces the fluxes of unpredictability.

And yet, if you look under Patterns above, it says “No patterns were found for this date range.” Really? Don’t I have healthful patterns? Doesn’t Clarity detect that most of the time I’m in range? Why is it Clarity only tells me I have patterns when my results are less than desired, as featured below.

Those overnight lows by the way are largely compression lows, when I roll over and my body presses on my CGM. Yet, that’s really not the point. Why, when I spend most of my time in range, does Clarity not tell me I have Patterns, like “You spent significant time in range between 6 AM and the following day 6 AM for 7 days in a row”? Or something like that. Cheeky, I know.

But I find it interesting that our human proclivity is to focus on the negative, the problem, the fly in the ointment. C’mon, Dexcom, patterns are not only to be found when things go wrong or results are less than desired. How about just, “lovely patterns were found for this date range”? Well, it’s a start.