As a person with diabetes I have discovered that managing the disease can require a great deal of contact with healthcare professionals. In a previous life I had very little contact with the medical profession and tended to assume that they were all pretty good at what they do and could be trusted to give sound advice backed up this sentiment as the professionals I have dealt with have, on the whole, been excellent both in their knowledge and method.
It still astounds me, therefore, to hear of the terrible horror stories and tales of utter ineptitude as related in this thread. If you are to manage your diabetes well, then you quickly learn a great deal about it and how it affects you in particular. Living with the consequences of a broken pancreas on a daily basis tends to reinforce the lessons learnt, and in a fairly short space of time you become a bit of an expert on the subject.
This knowledge, although it may not include the jargon and terminology, or scientific analysis applied by doctors, consultants and nurses, places a person with diabetes in a strong position to judge the competency or otherwise of their healthcare team. If you are on insulin then you learn through trial and error, with a little calculation and commonsense thrown in, how to dose in order to try and compensate for the food you are eating. You learn a great deal about diet, particularly in respect to carbohydrates in all their multitudinous incarnations, but also about things like fats and how they affect digestion or release of glucose. You learn about the best times to test your blood to try and trace your reactions to food, exercise, stress, insomnia, excitement and illness. You may test and inject thousands of times every year. Why then, do some doctors, who may otherwise appear intelligent and authoritative, think that they know more about it than you? More importantly, perhaps, why do they always seem to assume that you are testing too much?
How, in this day and age, can a person injecting insulin four or more times a day be expected to successfully manage blood sugar levels if they are told that they should test no more than once a day – or even once a week??? What happens to logic in the minds of those who utter such nonsense? How can a person newly-diagnosed with Type 2 be expected to successfully adapt their diet if they have no means of ascertaining how all their different meals affect them?
Any health professional featured in this thread should be thoroughly ashamed of the dreadful and sometimes dangerous things that have escaped from their flapping lips. Sadly, we must wonder about those many thousands of patients – and they must exist, surely – who receive such terrible advice and yet remain unaware that it is terrible, because they have been taught to trust the men and women in white coats unquestioningly. My hope is that, in the years to come and with wider acceptance of peer support such as the forum, fewer and fewer people will accept things at face value and learn to recognise the good from the bad. This thread should be required reading for diabetes professionals, and they should judge themselves honestly against it to see whether anything they have ever said or done would qualify them for a nomination!
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