Treating Diabetes

Treating diabetes isn't as simple as it first appears because you need to do more than just control your blood sugar and in Type 2 diabetes you want to try to reverse the disease process itself.

How To Treat Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is always treated with insulin therapy because the body has destroyed the cells in the pancreas which produce insulin, and without extra insulin you would die. This type of diabetes used to be called Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus (IDDM) or juvenile onset diabetes because it usually affects children and teenagers. Blood glucose meters together with blood glucose test strips and lancets and lancing devices are used to regularly check blood glucose levels to see that they are within the normal range, and if not then the diet or insulin dosage is adjusted as agreed in your diabetes care plan from your doctor.

How To Treat Type 2 Diabetes

Lifestyle changes are the first step in treating Type 2 diabetes, and the disease is considered to be reversible if enough effort is made to improve your lifestyle by healthy eating , exercise and If you are overweight you should also lose weight. However, this usually fails as most people need intensive support to achieve this and aree insufficiently motivated to implement the lifestyle changes that are necessary to achieve success. Using the services of a nutritionist and a personal trainer are recommended to give you the intensive support you need as long as these are used in conjunction with your doctor and not instead of proper medical treatment.

The diabetes diet is important as a way of controlling your blood sugar levels by healthy eating and avoiding unnecessary carbohydrates and sugar in food and drinks which causes you blood glucose levels to rise rapidly. The worst culprits being fizzy drinks, sugar, sweets and processed foods.

Exercise is important, but diabetes inevitably leads to muscle wasting as insulin is need for muscle growth. Building more muscle and losing fat is a goal to aim for to help reverse diabetes.

Tablet medicines are used if lifestyle changes aren't sufficient to keep the diabetes under control, though they don't control all of the the progressive health problems caused by diabetes which are causing damage to the body by the fundamental changes in the way the body works.These medicines help to improve blood glucose control by either stimulating the production of more insulin or making the cells in the body more sensitive to the effects of the insulin that is already circulating. However there often comes a time when these don't work as the insulin producing cells in the pancreas are either exhausted or damaged, and then Insulin therapy is needed. This means that blood glucose meters together with blood glucose test strips and lancets and lancing devices are used to regularly check blood glucose levels to see that they are within the normal range, and if not then the diet or insulin dosage is adjusted as agreed in your diabetes care plan from your doctor.

Other Important Health Considerations in Diabetes

In treating Type 2 diabetes the precise control of blood sugar levels is calculated to be only your 6th most important health concern.

Blood pressure control is very important in diabetes because if you look at the health problems caused by diabetes the main cause of death is by an increased risk of having a heart attack or stroke, and this is reduced more by controlling blood pressure than by tight blood glucose control.

Stop smoking is the second most important health risk to eliminate if you smoke because this also reduces your risk of heart attack and stroke.

Cholesterol control is also very important as the balance of healthy to unhealthy cholesterol have a large influence of your risk of having a heart attack.

Homocysteine control is also very important as it is a very strong indicator of your danger of having a heart attack or stroke, though strangely this isn't routinely checked for in the NHS.

Supplements For Diabetes

Health supplements can't treat diabetes but they can be a useful addition to conventional therapy. Supplements that have been recommended include: