Removal of An Ezine Article

To the readers of Diabetes and Living With It, I wish to note that I have removed an article dealing with Alkaline diets from this site. This was done due to certain questions that have arisen and the barest amount of research. My apologies to all parties.

Fallacies of Type 2 Diabetes

I was, as they say, surfing the web, looking up “fallacies of type 2 diabetes.” One of the items that came up involved a study that said, according to the New York Times article dated June 9, 2008, “[t]wo large studies involving more than 21,000 people found that people with Type 2 diabetes had no reduction in their risk of heart attacks and strokes and no reduction in their death rate if they rigorously controlled their blood sugar levels.” In fact, it went on, “… participants who were rigorously controlling their blood sugar actually had a higher death rate than those whose blood sugar control was less stringent.”
Needless to say, it caught my attention.

Now, before anybody trips over themselves thinking party time, even if this is 100% true, there are a number of medical reasons to “rigorously” control your blood sugar. Eyes, kidneys, and other little things like that.

I know an article from early June is old news, but ever since I read it way back when, it has bothered me. Let’s put it this way, if I were a wino, the story about having wine every day being good for your health would have had me doing back flips. Still, I am a chocolate freak, and the story about dark chocolate on a regular basis was good for your health did have me doing back flips. In my convoluted way, I am trying to say, we read what we want to read. For instance, I am sure that I could find a place in the middle of nowhere that has no speed limits, the average driver moves at one hundred miles an hour or more, and they have fewer accidents, per capita, then any other place on the face of the earth. Consequently, this research tells us that there is little correlation between speeding and having an accident. That’s great! The next time I get pulled over, I’ll just show the police office that little piece of research, and we’ll both be off and on our merry ways.

Unfortunately, being somewhat petty for my taste, the police office asked, did the research take into account whether there had been more then one car on the road? Was the road straight or curved? Oh, and by the way, that research your talking about did mention that 100% of those who did have an accident died. In other words, stick with what we know for now, and here is your pricey ticket for that little lesson.

One way or the other, I can pay the ticket. I might not be able to buy as much chocolate as I would like, but I can still buy chocolate. If I am a diabetic, I do not want to misinterpret some news and pay a much higher penalty for thinking I heard something I wanted to hear in the first place.

There were plenty of participants, 21,000, in the research, but what was the protocol(s)? Has their research been replicated? Are you exercising, losing weight, and doing everything else you can so that your condition does not worsen? I hope so.

Sorry - Been Working

To those of you who read my ezine articles, I apologize for having nothing new for the last week. Believe it or not, I have been building a web site from scratch. Anybody who was born pre-1980 understands that this is not the easiest thing in the world. Since I more than qualify for the pre-1980 category, I more than qualify.

In my never ending quest for honesty, I do have to make an admission. Aside from learning and using the technical aspects is hard, it has been made even more so with the beautiful weather we have been having in New England. My attention span is really being tested! I wish I had the fortitude to the fight the battle of letting my thoughts wander to the water lapping up to the beach of a cove I love to go to, but I can't. I am weak.

With the confession out of my system, have a wonderful day!

Viewer Friendly?

Short and sweet, if the site is not view friendly, please let me know. What might be great for some people is terrible for others.

Thanks for your help!

Diabetes - Curing and Controlling

With the possible exception of when they tell us something we do not want to hear, most of us consider anybody with the title “Doctor” in front of their name to be fairly intelligent. More wise in the subject at hand than we happen to be, hopefully. For instance, I break my leg, and Dr. John Doe strolls into the room to make things right. While he is busy doing whatever it is he has to do to set the bone, I, through gritted teeth, happen to ask, where did you go to medical school, Doctor? Oh, I have my doctorate in mathematics from Ivey Covered University. Great school, but wrong doctorate.

That being said, let’s get to the subject of curing and controlling diabetes. What I know about diabetes is what I got from researching the subject. To research a subject, go to the experts, the people doing the research, and the people who work with diabetics.

When they are told they are cured, most people believe the condition is gone. No more problems. I had chicken pox, but it is gone, and I have been cured. I never have to worry about chicken pox again! But, when I look up cured in a medical dictionary, I come up with, “remission of signs or symptoms of a disease especially during a prolonged period of observation” (Merriam-Webster, thank you) as one of the definitions. You tell somebody with a life threatening condition that the disease is in remission, they are happy and hopeful. Happy that the disease is not spreading, and hopeful that it will go away - forever! Once it is gone forever, everybody says that they have been cured - as we understand it. Listen, just about everybody has heard about the old chicken soup cure. You get a bad cold, get plenty of rest, drink plenty of fluids, and oh, yes, have plenty of mom’s chicken soup. I guarantee you, if you follow that advice, in just about a week, your cold will be gone. Since nobody has bothered to patent it, to my knowledge, anyway, I think that I will, and we’ll call it Buckley’s miracle cure for the common cold. How about, with the exception of the chicken soup, we just call it following the doctor’s advice on not making a bad condition worse.

Which brings us to controlled. The same source I used for cure, Merriam-Webster, and I am going to the medical dictionary, tells me that one of the definitions of controlling is “to reduce the incidence or severity of especially to innocuous levels (control an insect population) (a vaccine for controlling outbreaks of cholera." (please note, the <> symbol was changed to () for editing purposes). Such as, if I follow the proper diet, get some exercise, and do what they tell me to do, things will be better.

A long time ago, I was sitting on a rock in the woods and just watching the time go by. It was the middle of winter, and being in New England, it was really cold. Still, it was wonderful. After a while of contemplating nothing in particular, who should appear? It happened to be the most beautiful red fox I had ever seen. I was down wind, and the fox had no clue I was there. I just sat there watching this animal do its fox thing. While admiring that animal and the surroundings I was in, almost as an epiphany, I wondered how anybody, including myself, could doubt the existence of God. From that point on, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that God existed. That is called an act of faith. That being said, if I now told you to do such and such, and you will be cured of your diabetes, you would probably toss some well turned phrases in my general direction.

I believe in God, but unless he personally, or one of his certified heavenly representatives, tells me to stop taking medicines I need for my medical condition, do you think I am going to stop taking them without, say, talking to my doctor, first?

So far, most of the cures I have seen come down to doing what the medical people and dieticians have been telling you to do all along. I have a million things for you to buy at my blog, and I wish somebody would actually do so, but guess what - your health comes first! Keep in mind that there is a difference between curing and controlling.

Type 2 Diabetes And The Hunt For A Miracle Cure

Here we go again!

Since I am still in the process of looking for cures for diabetes, I figured I would look into the cure for the most common type. That, of course, is type 2. Find the cure for type 2 and we have done something wonderful for untold millions of people.

Once again, I used my renowned research capabilities and typed in “cure for type 2 diabetes”. In this case, nearly four and half million hits came back for “cure” and “type 2.” Since being overly anal is not something I care to toss onto my resume, I did not go through each and every hit to find out how many actually dealt with curing type 2 diabetes. In a term that might be considered somewhat less than academic when dealing with research, I can say, with all certainty, there were a lot that did.

The first cure I looked at said, being overweight was not really the problem. No, not at all. What it was happened to be the things that you ate which made you have diabetes. If, coincidently, you also happened to gain weight from these things, that was coincidental to being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Wending my way through the cures, a common thread seems to pop up. What is it? Well, it happens to be the old, I was cured of something I never really had in the first place line. One of those, I was an overweight, under exercised who was diagnosed as “pre-diabetic,” and I found the “cure” scenarios.

Why should we believe people like, say, those fine folks at the Mayo Clinic who put out such things as “[t]here's no cure for type 2 diabetes, but there's plenty you can do to manage — or prevent — the condition.” I suppose somebody could interpret “there is no cure” in more way than one.

The fact of the matter is, there is no cure for type 2 diabetes! Once you have it, there are ways to control it. That is what you should be looking for - ways to control it!

I am always preaching about seeing dieticians and diabetes education programs. See them, and do what they tell you to do! This is not just for the diabetic, but also for the family members of diabetics. One of the associated problems of diabetes, to my way of thinking, anyhow, is that it is hard to empathize if you do not really understand.

Please, do not look for miracle cures! Look for the best way to live with what has been dealt.

Procrastination

To be honest, unless I have something to say, in writing, anyway, I tend not to say it. When I do my Ezine articles, I stick to the subject at hand and do not use it as a sales platform. Once you get to my blog, there are plenty of things to click on, but that is up to you. The first priority of this blog site is diabetes!

Because of this that or the next thing, I have not completed a few pieces that I have been working on. For that, I apologize. I'm working on them, though! Sort of. The summer - since it seems to finally have arrived - doldrums have begun to set in.

For now, if I do not have anything in sooner, Happy 4th of July to all!