One of the old fashioned names for what we now call type II diabetes was non-insulin dependent diabetes because it meant that you never needed to have injections of insulin. Firstly, that’s wrong. It shows how progress has moved on and second, I think it’s a great pity because it was inherently denying one of the most important treatments that we can use for this condition. There will come a time, for some at least, of the sufferers of type II diabetes when they do need to have the oral medication supplemented with the most powerful way of reducing blood sugar and that of course is injections of insulin.

There are various types of insulins, you take short-term insulins which act very quickly and longer term ones which have a smoother, more progressive effect over a longer period of time. Some of them are artificially manufactured some of them are animal derived to some of them are derived from human types. They all have their differences and it’ll be up to you and your professionals to work out what you need in terms of the various mix of the short and long acting and the origin of the insulin which suits you best. It’s up to them, your professionals, to choose what they think is appropriate but it’s up to you to keep a very close eye onyour diabetic control and to to report back to them how things change. 

Now, I said that insulins were injectable, but, we also have to look to the future. One thing that’s been in the media and in the newspaper and the television recently is the concept of an insulin pump. This is a very clever gadget, it’s a piece of electronics that’s implanted under the skin and works in a similar way to the pancreas. What the pancreas does is to secrete, to manufacture insulin and release it into the bloodstream by a controlled mechanism that gives you the right amount of to control the blood sugar. We haven’t got quite that far yet, what the insulin pump does, as the name suggests, it has a reservoir of insulin inside it that does have to be topped up like all fuel tanks once in a while. But then what it does is to measure the amount that’s needed and to release that amount slowly into the bloodstream in exactly the same fashion. The great advantage, of course, is that you don’t have to inject. Injections, as we said are nothing like as complicated or even as distressing as people think before they try them but it still something that is socially limiting and it’s not something that many of us want to do. The insulin pump is just one example of the new technologies that are just around the corner. Diabetes is an important condition and there’s a lot of research going on that is just one example of the sort of things that I think we could look forward to and there will be others.

Posted: 15/01/2009