The 100 year anniversary of one of modern medicine’s most significant breakthroughs, insulin to treat diabetes is this week. I found the Toronto Star’s reportage of this interesting-MUCH better than so much modern reporting of “breakthroughs”-it warns of raising hopes too much and explains delays in making the treatment available to all. Interesting read, fascinating that they include such a lot of details about the life of Banting and Best. It’s strange to think that only 50 years before I was born, type 1 diabetes meant certain death. https://insulin.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/insu ..read more

Something that isn’t getting a lot of press in Australia is oximeters. In Singapore the government provided each citizen with 2 RAGS and an oximeter. Oximeters are those little things that they clip on your finger in hospital and they measure the oxygen in your blood. This is in no way medical advice but I have heard some GPs are telling people to monitoring their oxygen levels and temperature at home if they have covid-19. Staying at home is probably preferable for most people-personally and medically if possible but if your oxygen levels fall, then you know you’ll need to go to hospital ..read more

Melinda Seed writes for Twice Diabetes It’s been a while but here’s some new stuff (dare I say n3#s in Australia) Living Guidelines Don’t get too excited, it’s not guidelines developed in consultation with the lived experience of diabetes, it’s health professional developed continuously contemporary guidelines. Most clinical guidelines are out of date before they are disseminated, by the time everybody involved has commented, revised, argued about, watered down, etc etc a guideline the technology and treatment paradigms have changed. In an attempt to overcome this, a thing called “living gui ..read more

Melinda Seed writes for Twice Diabetes Way back in 2016, I reported on a small study that showed glyceamic responses to food varied markedly between individuals, and raised a number of questions about what that means for those of us who count carbs, factor in the glycemic index to calculate a bolus and are taught to expect results in accordance with the published data on glycemic load. One of the researchers involved in this study, Eran Elinav from Weizmann Institute of Science was a presenter at this year’s Australasian Diabetes Congress. It was great to hear from the presenter directly, esse ..read more

Melinda Seed writes for Twice Diabetes Spoiler alert: The answer is a resounding NO! As you’d know from my frenzied tweeting last week and my last blog post about tech I was at the Australasian Diabetes Congress #19ADC last week. Rather than do a highlights post, I’ve decided to do some topic specific posts on what I learned at the Congress. Coming soon is research about effectiveness of technology in type 1, what’s new in food and diabetes and where’s the voice of the people with D? Although there are no game-changers yet in terms of the cure I was encouraged to hear about some more small st ..read more

Melinda Seed I was fortunate enough to be part of the #DAPeoplesVoice for 2019, this means DA organises a media pass for us to attend the Australian Diabetes Congress, as it’s in my home town this year, I’m organising my own transport and accommodation. I know everyone’s always eager to hear about new tech, so the big announcement is the launch of the Solo Pump from Roche. Here’s what I know so far: It’s a pump patch and it’s much smaller than either the Omnipod or the Cellnovo (neither of which are available in Australia as of today’s date). Before you get too excited the Solo isn’t availa ..read more

Melinda Seed Last week I attended the The Association of Regulatory and Clinical Scientists to the Australian Pharmaceutical Industry (ARCS) conference. The conference is a professional development opportunity for scientists (be they doctors, nurses, pharmacists, researcher scientists or software developers) who work in the pharmaceutical or medical device industry-including in the regulatory sphere. The theme of the conference was “Putting patients at the centre of healthcare”, and it was heartening to see ARCS starting to walk the talk by awarding 17 consumer scholarships to cover 17 non-pr ..read more

Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family? Melinda Seed writes for Twice Diabetes The diabetes world knows that people are travelling to Canada and Mexico to buy insulin. We know that people have died in the United States from a lack of insulin. We know that the prices of all but the most basic and ‘peaky’ biosimilars are unaffordable for many, many working Americans. “Last month, the powerful Senate Finance Committee asked the three dominant insulin makers detailed questions about the drugs’ price increases. The price for one vial of Eli Lilly’s Humalog surged ..read more

Melinda Seed writes for Twice Diabetes National Diabetes Week (July 14-20) is almost upon us and the theme is “early detection saves lives”. Diabetes Australia have a webpage devoted to It’s about Time and I’m glad to see this positive campaign again. My plea though is that amongst early detection and screening and pre-diabetes, the general public and particularly the medical profession don’t get confused about the urgency of a type 1 diabetes diagnosis. Undiagnosed type 1 diabetes kills and does so quickly, particularly in children. Most of the children who are diagnosed in DKA don’t have a ..read more

Renza Scibilia blogged last week about her bewilderment at so many professionals at a diabetes conference lining up to get their A1c checked. Melinda Seed writes I too have been surprised to see the longest lines at conferences being for the on-the-spot A1c checks. Perhaps all these people are wanting a free diabetes screening because they’re worried about their diabetes status-it would be charitable to assume that. I have my suspicions though, just like Renza’s neighbour who feels it’s about feeling good about their own number whilst judging yours. I think this checking of A1c is a way in wh ..read more