Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

My co-workers and I were talking the other day about our recycling, and one of them mentioned that they now put out more recycling every week than they put out actual garbage. I’ve actually lived in places where a couple of decades ago, there were people arguing that recycling pickup wasn’t worth the cost to have it picked up on a regular basis. Now many of us are throwing out less than we’re recycling. Where would we be if we were still throwing everything away?

Just like when there was no such thing as recycling newspaper, plastic and glass bottles (heck, I can remember when all bottles were glass), cardboard, and metal, there was a time when performing a blood glucose check at home was a pipe dream. There was a time when an insulin pump (no injections? get out!) was something out of a sci-fi novel.

But lo and behold, over time, those devices not only became a reality, they’ve become a fixture in our diabetes lives. New things do get developed. New technology emerges. New therapies are perfected.

That’s why I get a little sad when I hear people say bad things about the artificial or bionic pancreas. It’s disheartening to hear someone dis remote monitoring of their CGM.

The reality is that these two ideas are coming to fruition at a rapid pace. We already know that artificial/bionic pancreas technology, when filtered through an appropriate algorithm, functions far better, with far less effort, in a safer way, than the average patient does on their own. Side note: Can I just refer to it as artificial/bionic pancreas now? Even now, after years of development and testing, this technology is changing further to include a bihormonal (insulin and glucagon) solution. Can you tell me you were thinking about that ten years ago?

And what about remote monitoring of your CGM? We know that Nightscout has already rolled out a solution that can allow parents to send their children to school or to sleepovers with a little less apprehension. Adults can use the CGM In The Cloud to keep their family members in the know, on a real-time basis. Was this on your list of cool diabetes ideas six or seven years ago?

I know it takes a long, long time for products to come to market. But I know that with the help of technology and some extremely smart cookies, new diabetes devices and software are going from concept to go live faster than ever before.

I know that there is still so much about diabetes that will remain dangerous, even after the latest innovations come to our doorstep. But I also know that fear of what still exists is not worth not taking steps to erase some or all of the fear of dangerous nighttime lows.

I know that a cure is still out of our grasp. But I also know that I am willing to live with incremental improvements in care and delivery systems until a cure becomes reality. And I am not willing to wait on everything until a cure is within reach.

I don’t believe I’ve ever written this before. But for the record, I am 1000 percent behind the #WeAreNotWaiting movement. Where last year there were only a few isolated pockets of innovation and collaboration in diabetes technology, there are now visible signs that collaboration and innovation are occurring and are at work right now. And that leaves me thinking that with the speed of technology, #WeAreNotWaiting will soon go from a fringe idea of faster implementation of new ideas, to an inventive steamroller that eventually leaves non-believers thinking #WeShouldn’tHaveWaited.

I was not prompted by anyone to write anything on this subject, but I was inspired by this blog post, and this one too.