Posted by klausen on October 27, 2002 at 03:32:16:
In Reply to: Re: filter reports for keywords, place in useless bin posted by Steve on October 26, 2002 at 08:46:56:
From my nearly endless experience with diabetes, I would say that there are three ways to lose your life to the disease. By letting the blood sugar run consistently high you can have a much less burdened, much more normal and spontaneous lifestyle than most diabetics, but over time the complications will probably be accelerated, leading to early morbidity and mortality. By letting blood sugar run consistently low you can delay complications, but run a high risk of death or injury from severe hypoglycemia. By managing the disease intensively to avoid highs and lows you can also lose your life, not biologically but socially and psychologically, by making yourself a slave of blood sugar meters, insulin injections, dietary calculations, physicians' appointments, and the enormous and unnatural mental and emotional investment in something which nature should take of automatically, and which warps your development as a person by turning you into a pancreas-imitator rather than a free, spontaneous, fully active and creative human being.
There is something to be said both for and against each of these approaches, but my argument with what the doctors you cite say is that they seem so unaware of the downside of such an active and perpetual engagement with the disease. Humans are first and foremost psychological and social beings, but doctors, who are trained as biologists, not humanists, tend to underestimate the importance of these aspects, and forget that sacrificing so much of normal existence for the sake of a more normal physiology under an intensive management program may be every bit as damaging to the 'whole person' as the complications themselves.