Preventive attacks are all the fashion these days. It has a boring middle-eastern dictator hiding weapons of mass destruction? The first strike should sort it. It has a little of a global financial crisis on the horizon? Head it, giving everyone a new plasma TV.
But first strikes do not always work as well (just ask George Bush). Earlier this year, a doctor pre-emptive strike was abandoned because it was killing many people. The U.S. National Institutes of Health halted part of a clinical trial ongoing diabetes, because it was clear that patients receiving treatment had a 22 percent risk of dying people who were not.
The study involved aggressively treat blood sugar with medication. Type II diabetes is caused by persistently high blood sugar. The standard treatment for high blood sugar (and therefore diabetes) is a recipe for "eat less fat and more exercise. When that does not work (it almost never does) the prescription is changed to a combination of drugs.
There are some different types of medication, but the most commonly used in Australia work by stimulating the body to produce more insulin. Insulin is the hormone that naturally produce clear sugar from the blood. But when there is excess fat in the arteries, the body becomes less sensitive to insulin and sugar are not kept clean. If the blood sugar remains high for a long time, the damage begins to occur in where we have lots of small blood vessels, such as kidneys, our eyes and, finally, our hands and feet.
Drugs that insulin squeeze a little more out of our pancreas to help clean the blood sugar. As you might expect, putting the pancreas into overdrive, eventually results in conking throughout. So the only option is to start injecting insulin every day. Until then, drugs have converted a type II diabetic (which produces insufficient insulin) in a diabetic type I (which produces no).
Unfortunately, a side effect of medicines is weight gain. Give people more insulin (or have them produce it themselves) simply sugar channels out of the bloodstream and converts them into fat.
The measure of long-term preferential blood sugar test is the hemoglobin A1c. People without diabetes have an A1c between four and six percent. The goal of the current treatment for people with diabetes is to manage the use of drugs, in order to maintain A1c below seven percent. The trial was abandoned an attempt to see if people could use even higher doses of drugs and push back to normal. And it seems to have been a very good idea at all. The side effect has become a little more unpleasant than simply putting a few pounds. Twenty two percent of patients died.
Giving more insulin to a person's insulin resistance is to cure the arterial blockage, increasing blood pressure. A smarter strategy is to remove the lock. Unfortunately for diabetics "blocking" fats in the blood is high, something that can not be simply cut out with the surgeon scalpel.
Diabetes now affects 13 percent of U.S. adult population with twice the number estimated to be pre-diabetic insulin resistant (), a total of 40 percent. Australia is not there yet, but we are drifting that way as fast as our fat little feet can lead us. When 40 percent of our adult population requires a treatment with a course of lifelong drug, you better start thinking about some tax increases seriously to keep the health care system afloat. Pay back the economic stimulus package will be least of our concerns.
The pharmacological standard treatment for diabetes does not cure anything. It only offers an invidious trade-off between prevention of kidney damage, blindness and gangrene today and gain weight and permanent pancreatic damage tomorrow.
About the Author:
David Gillespie is a recovering lawyer and author of Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat (Penguin)
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Treatment Or Cure?
