Whose fault is it?

A recent article entitled, Why Physicians Do Not Initiate Insulin Earlier, states the following:

The results showed that the subjects failing to initiate prescribed insulin commonly reported misconceptions regarding insulin risk (35% believed that insulin causes blindness, renal failure, amputations, heart attacks, strokes, or early death), plans to instead work harder on behavioral goals, sense of personal failure, low self-efficacy, injection phobia, hypoglycemia concerns, negative impact on social life and job, inadequate health literacy, health care provider inadequately explaining risks/benefits, and limited insulin self-management training.

So, whose fault is it that these 35% of surveyed patients think that insulin therapy is the cause of what are actually complications of poorly controlled diabetes?

I’m gobsmacked that a survey can come up with this data! Is the survey saying that it wasn’t known before that misconceptions about insulin are so prevalent?

Again, I ask, whose fault is that. In some 90 years of insulin therapy, you’d think that by now patient education would be far better than what this survey reveals.

On the other hand, despite the Internet and its information revolution, the general misconceptions about diabetes are huge! The basic difference between Type 1 and Type 2 – people can’t even get that right!

Type 1 is an autoimmune disease in which antibodies attack and result in little or not production of insulin. No definitive cause (possibly genes and some trigger) and no cure for Type 1 (and all its variants – LADA, MODY etc) at this time folks unless you have a transplant, or some other experimental therapy, which aren’t widely available.

Type 2 is caused by a number of factors, but not autoimmune disease. Sure, if you have autoimmune disease and you’re taking cortisone, that will raise your blood sugar and can bring on Type 2 Diabetes. But Type 2 is not autoimmune in nature. It’s more about fat resistance and because of it, an overabundance of insulin. More info about Type 2 and its causes can be found at Blood Sugar 101, which has by far the best info about type 2, especially the article entitled, You Did NOT Eat Your Way to Diabetes. This article should be required reading for every doctor, nurse and diabetes educator, and anyone else who has anything to say about Type 2 Diabetes, especially those who like to comment with insulting and uneducated remarks.

With all the misconceptions about diabetes, is it any wonder that some people think insulin therapy itself is some kind of fatal risk?

Come on folks! If medicine wasn’t so much about money, education would have come a lot further by now. People who didn’t want to start insulin might not have gone on to having the very complications they thought they’d have by using insulin. Crazy isn’t it?