Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Need help with your resolutions?

You know; the ones to lose weight and exercise that you (and I) probably make every year, but fail to keep. Well, here's some additional incentive; doctors are finding, apparently, that type 2 (adult onset) diabetics who drop 10% or more of their weight are often cured of their diabetes. The study was about gastric banding, but others who managed to do this with diet were also cured.

Annoyed with the cost of medical care? Looks like a walk and a salad are your prescription.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The information we've been pounded with over the last 10 or so years about Type II diabetes is yet another example of statistics being extrapolated downward to individuals without considering the actual details of cause and effect.

Case in point: every time I have to fill out a medical history or get an exam for life insurance, I have to put up with the look of concern on the face of the examiner when I reveal that I have two close relatives who have been diagnosed with Type II. (Incidentally, in both cases, the diagnosis got them off their backsides and while they wouldn't be reckoned "cured of diabetes" as in your article, but in both cases they were able to drastically cut their medicine within a few months of getting scared straight, and don't appeared to have suffered any serious effects of the disease, almost ten years out. So that bears out the findings of your article.)

Here's the thing, though: I simply don't believe that I am at particularly high risk for Type II, regardless of my "family history." In the first place, these two people were in my generation, but no one in previous generations except for one great-grandmother was ever diagnosed or suspected of being diabetic. More pertinently, before their diagnoses, those two were overweight couch potatoes with atrocious eating habits -- I'm not. I'm not in as good of shape as I ought to be, but I'm well within the desirable weight range and have always considered one of my primary job tasks as a mom to be providing good nutrition to the family.

So it frosts me that because some statistic out there somewhere says that relatives of Type II patients are at high risk for Type II, that means a thin, healthy middle aged woman with good eating habits and no significant multi-generational history of diabetes gets to be told that she is at high risk because she has two brothers who let themselves go between 25 and 50. "Don't they teach logic in these schools anymore?" ;-)

Bike Bubba said...

Well said. And in my experience, you can get a Ph.D. without ever darkening the door of a logic class. It shows in academia and elsewhere.