"New" medication for diabetes

Originally Posted by norseman

. I think the key is that I do not obsess over the diabetes or blood glucose or diet.

Ya coulda avoided insulin all together if you had obsessed a bit over these earlier on!

Glad to hear the rest is working out for you though! Mid 70's is good! I'll race you to the late 90's! :^)

[innerlight]

Originally Posted by norseman

And yet Stephen, I rely on a blend of Western and Eastern medical practices and, here I am 12 years longer than I was supposed to live. Reasons - stopping smoking + complex heart surgery AND meditation daily plus a lot of strolling in beautiful wild country.
p.s. even doctors rate my diet as excellent [Japanese style]

This is your best route to take. Not in abandoning one over the other, but in using all avenues to pursue optimum health.

Mentality, as well as activities that one enjoys can be incredibly beneficial to help with longevity and managing all health ailments. From what you have written in this thread it seems you are doing a fantastic job with what you are doing. So kudos to you and that.

I hope your changes in meds can help with the weight loss, and with helping your memory as well.

[Silver]

Yes, if it's working for you...if it ain't broke, don't fix it! I was put on glipizide originally, and while on that, I did my own researching and working towards lowering my blood sugar and now, it's been ages (possibly a couple years) since I last had to take any glipizide or any other prescription for diabetes.

Originally Posted by Silvergirl

I was put on glipizide originally, and while on that, I did my own researching and working towards lowering my blood sugar and now, it's been ages (possibly a couple years) since I last had to take any glipizide or any other prescription for diabetes.

Isn't it nice to be reliant on what your own body can do, instead of hoping and relying on a chemical that was created in some lab! My wife and I both worried a great deal about the chemical route... she knew that weight gain would go with it, and that once started it's a slippery slope from then on. Happily that's no longer an issue! :^)

Unless an individual is a type 1 diabetic then having to take insulin is notably unnecessary! It can be addressed through diet, since it was diet originally that brought this about!

I went and asked Dr. Mercola and he readily agrees! :^)
Type 2: “Non-Insulin-Dependent Diabetes”

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/09/02/diabetes-most-of-what-youve-been-told-may-be-wrong.aspx

Type 2 diabetes is by far the more common form of the disease, affecting 90 to 95 percent of diabetics, and is completely preventable and nearly 100 percent curable.
If you have type 2, your body is producing some insulin but is unable to recognize insulin and use it properly. This is an advanced stage of insulin-resistance.
Medications and supplements are NOT the answer for type 2 diabetes; restoring your sensitivity to insulin and leptin is what’s needed.

[norseman]

I think at the heart of whatever strategy you use for health, the big issue is WILL. I also know that I have lived several lives so far, and know that I will have more after this one. I fully intend being here to see my oak trees in their maturity.

Originally Posted by norseman

I think at the heart of whatever strategy you use for health, the big issue is WILL.

This is indeed important. Along with "will" comes a level of "certainty" that helps to relax our bodily systems, thus mitigating some of the inner stressors that tend to mess with our physical well-being.

But there is one difference that you and I have going for us that those who are much younger than us don't. You are about 15 years older than I am but we were both essentially raised on a less chemically laden diet than those who are being raised today. We got off to a fairly healthy start... so our physical foundations, and some of our eating habits, are better oriented toward longevity and health.

Now enter fast food, food additives, artificial sweeteners, overly processed bagged, boxed and canned products, ultra pasteurized milk, chemicals added to meat to help keep that "red" look for longer, the list of such exposures is endless today.... and is essentially destroying the physical well-being that would help carry our grandchildren toward our current age.

I've been reading a great deal (in relation to the generations that follow us) as to how their longevity is being compromised by this exposure. So while we can feel certain that we will live longer, they have much less to work with... Stuff like diebeties is a tell-tale symptom of what's roaring-in like a freight-train. To us it's a nuisance, while to our children and grand children it's an ever-developing danger, while growing intensively-worse for those to soon follow.

And the medical world isn't helping. They throw us chemical candy in order to dampen the symptoms to the point that we think they're addressing what ails us. And yet we only get sicker and get used to the process..

To be "positive thinkers" is a nice thing to adopt, but it tends to pave-over some of the very things we should be growing deeply concerned over! It's not a "win" to have our blood sugars being artificially maintained, if the core of what we're confronting is not being addressed.

We need to wake up as individuals and as a culture.... cause we're running out of repetitive cycles on our snooze alarm...

[norseman]

"we were both essentially raised on a less chemically laden diet than those who are being raised today."
I wish, Stephen. My first post was Quality Controller in a plant manufacturing Sodium Cyanide, second one manufactured metallic Sodium - that's where I got my body Mercury burden. Then Petrochemicals, then Pharmaceuticals. Finally, Metals Refining - Lead and Silver. So Lead and cadmium to add to the mix. Then, after 35 years or so, I gain it up to teach Under-grads.
But I take your point. No industrial or convenience food [apart from fish and chips - brit staple food ], no toxic fizzy drinks.

Originally Posted by norseman

"we were both essentially raised on a less chemically laden diet than those who are being raised today."
I wish, Stephen. My first post was Quality Controller in a plant manufacturing Sodium Cyanide, second one manufactured metallic Sodium - that's where I got my body Mercury burden. Then Petrochemicals, then Pharmaceuticals. Finally, Metals Refining - Lead and Silver. So Lead and cadmium to add to the mix. Then, after 35 years or so, I gain it up to teach Under-grads.
But I take your point. No industrial or convenience food [apart from fish and chips - brit staple food ], no toxic fizzy drinks.

Ewwwwwww you were in the thick of it!! The one thing I can see in this, that worked to your advantage, is that the chemical exposure was focused on specific chemicals and in a repetitive way. Oddly it seems our body can adjust over time to a certain exposure along these lines. Our bodies are quite adaptable, shifting around within DNA templates in order to address environmental exposures. This was a key occurrence in the movie "Super Size Me" in which a mostly vegetarian oriented film maker subjected himself to nothing but McDonalds for a month. His blood tests, a couple of weeks into it, was so shocking that the doctors monitoring him wanted him stop... but about a week after that his body started adjusting and his test's leveled-off and began moving toward a more sustainable level.

The key to what happened seems to be located in Bruce Lipton's (a long time geneticist who wasn't in the film) observations on how our DNA functions and adapts to stressful situations. When the environment we live in-relation-to changes, our body will sense this in a number of ways. Our body will start creating a bunch of differing cells based on the potential variations within our DNA, all the while searching for a "fit". When it finds a combination that "works" it will create an RNA profile/template and start massively replicating this "fit". This can serve as a "Patch" to help the body through a stressful change as best as possible.

But of course, over time, if the stressors are not conducive to health in general then the patch will only partly protect us from such stressors for only so long. Eventually things will start heading south due to the fatigue that our organs and endocrine system must daily have to deal with.

Our bodies are amazing!! But they can't super-navigate the impossible for long. Our bodies are so good at adapting, that we can actually think that things are okay... until we get a good look under the hood and finally realize that we're doing far more damage than we had originally suspected...

This is just a general FYI posting on diabetes...

This is a great video along the lines of curing diabetes, as well as addressing just about everything else that ails us. Mark Hyman is a "functional medicine" doctor, who addresses the body in a "whole systems" way.... For a good half hour overview in relation to "easily" curing diabetes this is worth the watch! :^)
He doesn't have much good to say about "Statins" either...

Bestselling Author Mark Hyman, M.D. - The Blood Sugar Solution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGeRIEyEoE

Here's another great video with Dr Mark Hyman, where he goes much deeper into his health care approach!

Authors@Google: Dr. Mark Hyman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAZVpsd2Nao

I just bought the kindle edition of his book "The Blood Sugar Solution", not bad at $6.99.... I love that the much cheaper digital versions are available! :^)

[tealily]

TOTALLY agree on the diet thing. That's 50%. The other 50% is lifestyle - exercise has been shown again and again to raise GLUT4 levels (kind of like the "magic door" for glucose to enter muscle cells). Additional studies have also shown that it doesn't even need to be intense exercise to see these benefits - resistance exercise is often recommended (although some people just won't take a shine to this, and that's ok) but even low-intensity cardio like walking can still be very powerful in up-regulating the peripheral insulin receptors.

I can only presume that my university teaches the same as the rest of the world - medications can treat one symptom, but will always come with side effects. The only real cure-all/all-around preventative is a healthy lifestyle :)