By Jonathan Brown, I was a diabetes scientist for 25 years.
Good question! What most people do, unfortunately, is become very fearful and self-blaming, and then retreat into denial until something really bad happens (that probably could have been prevented). So # 1 and #2 are…
1. Relax! Diabetes is not a death sentence. Actually, for most people with good medical care, diabetes diagnosis is nothing more than small upward change in a lab value. It is a warning sign. It is the “complications” of diabetes that you want to avoid. And with modern medicines, you can reduce your risk of these complications to the level of someone your age without diabetes, maybe even better.
2. Accept that you now have a permanent chronic illness that you must learn to live with. This is hard to accept! Don’t grasp at straws like avoiding medicines and medical care in the hope that you can “reverse” or “cure” diabetes with better diet and more exercise. That is possible but honestly very unlikely (and even if you succeed, it will be from constant attention and action—the very opposite of denial—and you will still want to take most of the preventive medicines that a diabetes diagnosis should trigger—see below). It is much safer to start all basic medicines immediately. If you can later beat the odds and control your blood sugar with diet and exercise, you can stop some of these drugs.
3. Start meformin to control your blood sugar. There are newer, fancier, and more expensive blood sugar medicines, but metformin is the safe and proven medicine that also reduces heart attack and mortality risk, and helps you lose weight. Your doctor must have a very exceptional reason (something that makes you much unlike other newly diagosed patients) to recommend anything else.
4. Getting your blood sugar controlled does VERY LITTLE to prevent the diabetes complications that can disable you and kill you. So also get your blood pressure under control with medicines. Blood pressure is implicated in causing ALL the complications of diabetes that you want to avoid. Everything from blindness, neuropathy, and kidney damage to heart attack and stroke.
5. Start taking a “statin” medicine to prevent heart attack and stoke. Do this regardless of what your cholesterol level is or isn’t. Cardiovascular disease is by far the main killer in persons with type 2 diabetes. In many randomized trials involving tens of thousands of patients, statins reduced heart attack risk by 30% and, correcting for failures to take the drug as directed, by 50%.
6. Oh, and if you are a smoker, STOP IMMEDIATELY. This will do more than any medicine and any diet, or all of them combined, to save your life. Within a week, your heart attack risk alone will drop by more than half!
Read about >> How To Reverse Diabetes Naturally
Good question! What most people do, unfortunately, is become very fearful and self-blaming, and then retreat into denial until something really bad happens (that probably could have been prevented). So # 1 and #2 are…
1. Relax! Diabetes is not a death sentence. Actually, for most people with good medical care, diabetes diagnosis is nothing more than small upward change in a lab value. It is a warning sign. It is the “complications” of diabetes that you want to avoid. And with modern medicines, you can reduce your risk of these complications to the level of someone your age without diabetes, maybe even better.
2. Accept that you now have a permanent chronic illness that you must learn to live with. This is hard to accept! Don’t grasp at straws like avoiding medicines and medical care in the hope that you can “reverse” or “cure” diabetes with better diet and more exercise. That is possible but honestly very unlikely (and even if you succeed, it will be from constant attention and action—the very opposite of denial—and you will still want to take most of the preventive medicines that a diabetes diagnosis should trigger—see below). It is much safer to start all basic medicines immediately. If you can later beat the odds and control your blood sugar with diet and exercise, you can stop some of these drugs.
3. Start meformin to control your blood sugar. There are newer, fancier, and more expensive blood sugar medicines, but metformin is the safe and proven medicine that also reduces heart attack and mortality risk, and helps you lose weight. Your doctor must have a very exceptional reason (something that makes you much unlike other newly diagosed patients) to recommend anything else.
4. Getting your blood sugar controlled does VERY LITTLE to prevent the diabetes complications that can disable you and kill you. So also get your blood pressure under control with medicines. Blood pressure is implicated in causing ALL the complications of diabetes that you want to avoid. Everything from blindness, neuropathy, and kidney damage to heart attack and stroke.
5. Start taking a “statin” medicine to prevent heart attack and stoke. Do this regardless of what your cholesterol level is or isn’t. Cardiovascular disease is by far the main killer in persons with type 2 diabetes. In many randomized trials involving tens of thousands of patients, statins reduced heart attack risk by 30% and, correcting for failures to take the drug as directed, by 50%.
6. Oh, and if you are a smoker, STOP IMMEDIATELY. This will do more than any medicine and any diet, or all of them combined, to save your life. Within a week, your heart attack risk alone will drop by more than half!
Read about >> How To Reverse Diabetes Naturally
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