Posted on 05/29/2011 8:29:09 PM PDT by neverdem
WHEN it comes to prescription drugs, newer is not necessarily better. And that’s especially true when treating diabetes.
One in 10 Americans has Type 2 diabetes. If the trend continues, one in three will suffer from the disease by the year 2050, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Most Type 2 diabetes patients take one or more drugs to control blood sugar. They spent an estimated $12.5 billion on medication in 2007, twice the amount spent in 2001, according to a study by the University of Chicago. (That figure does not including drugs that diabetics are often prescribed for related health conditions, like high blood pressure and high cholesterol.)
Why the increase? More diagnosed patients, more drugs per patient and an onslaught of expensive new drugs, according to Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study. Since 1995, several new classes of diabetes medications have come on the market. Diabetes drugs are important to the pharmaceutical industry, more lucrative than drugs for many other chronic diseases, Dr. Alexander noted in an interview.
Simply put, many of these drugs help the body produce less glucose or more insulin, the hormone that shuttles glucose into cells for use as energy, or they increase the body’s sensitivity to its own insulin.
Patients and health care professionals have long hoped that as pharmaceutical companies found ways to help the body lower blood sugar, they would produce safer and more efficient alternatives to older medications. But a true breakthrough doesn’t seem to have happened yet.
A report released in March by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University reviewed data from 166 studies to evaluate the effectiveness and risks of various...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why do so many people have diabetes? It’s got to be a byproduct of lifestyle and diet.
Also of diagnosis.
Like the peanut allergies, we are diagnosing and treating things that people just died of a couple of generations ago.
It’s also a side effect of some prescription medications!!!
Pretty much linearly related to % body fat so it is an outgrowth of the horrible food pyramid Sen McGovern foisted on the American people to sell more corn from his state and further magnified by Ag Sec Butts.
We have been poisoned by our government so farmers can be further subsidized just like our cars are being poisoned by ethanol.
Plus chronic carbon monoxide poisoning contributes. CO is a byproduct of combustion, doesn’t matter if your huffing the tail pipe of a cab, burning cornstalks, fighting fires or smoking Kools, carbon monoxide is deadly.
“It’s also a side effect of some prescription medications!!!”
There are over 700 drugs which will induce either glycemic or insulin dysfunction including permanent Type 2 diabetes according to the leading researcher on the topic, the Chair of Medicine at U of Auckland.
Most anti-hypertensive drugs will jack your blood sugar up.
I suggest you eat like a cave man (paleo-diet) which is what we spent a million years adapting too until we decide to include corn, sugar and potatoes in every meal.
There are many reasons people become diabetic. Not only lifestyle and diet, but also heredity. Long term usage of corticosteroids also damages the pancreas and can induce diabetes. Diabetes runs in my family. My mom is 72 and was recently diagnosed. (She’s not obese) She was controlling her diabetes with her diet until her rheumatologist injected steroids into her hips and knees. It caused her blood sugar to spike enough that she had to be put on metformin. She’s hoping that once the steroids work themselves out of her system, that her blood sugar will come back down.
No, it doesn't. diabetes II - evidence of infectious cause
Like other conditions such as high blood pressure the criteria for a bad level been lowered over time.
I had an older doctor several years ago (he was in his 80’s, and smoked cigars), who died at 87. Anyways, he told me that he thought there was a direct link between diabetes and artificial sweeteners.
He said that with the advent of those sweeteners, diabetes skyrocketed. He was paying attention to research, that said those sweeteners tricked the pancreas into thinking that real sugar was being ingested, so it would produce insulin. But, since it wasn’t real sugar, the insulin was for naught, and eventually the pancreas and brain learned not to produce insulin when it sensed sugary substances being ingested. As use of the sweeteners went on, the pancreas would just ignore both the artificial and real sugars.
He was pretty sure there was a relationship, and he told me many of his colleagues were also on to something, but nothing would get published on it, even when submitted, it was just ignored.
He was also a firm believer that there were many cures for many ailments, but drug companies were not interested in cures, they were more interested in life-long treatments.
He was the doctor that put me on fish oil tablets, which dropped my cholesterol dramatically. He said the benefits for statins were not great enough to outweigh the harmful side effects for most people.
He had many different views on many subjects, and was quite a character. He had grown up in farmland Iowa, was an army surgeon, then came to Chicago and taught for many years at UIC Circle Medical. I met him when he was the head surgeon for the Shriners Hospital here, he was a fellow Mason, and did great charity works. A truly remarkable man, with a truly remarkable view on how things worked.
You have a list of the medications that might cause diabetes?
“Why do so many people have diabetes? It’s got to be a byproduct of lifestyle and diet.
No, it doesn’t. diabetes II - evidence of infectious cause”
They don’t know, but until cures become more lucrative than long term treatment (license to print money), they won’t.
Having good luck with 70% meat and veg, 30% high fiber carbs (recalling a boot camp expression “...get on the street for beans and meat...”
Cheers
bump...
But you are right about the money, the MP uses generic drugs (well except for benicar, which is off-patent in most of the world, and goes off-patent in the USA in 2016). There won't be big money made on this cure.
Raising blood glucose levels chronically can lead to diabetes. Here’s a list of those drugs: http://www.dlife.com/diabetes/type-2/diabetes-treatment/drugs-that-raise-blood-glucose
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