There are multiple costs to non-compliance, including financial, both personal and societal, and physical-emotional. When patients fail to comply with treatment protocols, fail to get prescribed tests, or fail to stop destructive behaviors, there is a societal cost.
Today, I want to address the physical and emotional costs of non-compliance. I just read a brilliant article by Roxanne Sukol, MD. Dr. Sukol’s article discussed the fact that diabetes starts ...
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"More than half of all Americans may develop diabetes or pre-diabetes by 2020, unless prevention strategies aimed at weight loss and increased physical activity are widely implemented, according to a new analysis. Diabetes is an epidemic, " according to Denise Mann in WebMD Health News.
At 14 months old, the doctor told my parents that the disease would ultimately take my life. The doctor motioned my father into the hallway of ...
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I like my patients vertical. Not horizontal.
If I can help it, I want to make sure that nobody gets a disease that could have been prevented. Sure, accidents happen. And illnesses show up every day in the lives of people who did nothing to deserve them, and who could have done nothing to prevent them. But not all illnesses.
Physicians know that newly diagnosed diabetic patients present to the doctor ...
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Recently, I saw one of my sons blithely dipping a chip into salsa, happily munching away while multi-tasking at something else – not a care in the world about his food.
It brought a smile to my face – but there was a touch of sadness with it.
You see, my work has brought me into contact with a number of PWDs (People With Diabetes) who are active on-line. And as I’ve ...
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by Doctor D, MD
A teacher asks Doctor D about a diabetic teenager in his class: "His sugar readings are often over 400. His mom says this is normal. Can this be normal?"
What is normal?
a) A state of harmony within the body and mind that leads to health and well-being.
b) The typical or status quo for a person; the way things usually are.
c) WTF? There is no such ...
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When I was a family medicine intern, I met a diabetic patient in the hospital who had stopped seeing his regular doctor after he lost his job and his health insurance.
His untreated diabetes made his feet go numb. He stepped on a nail and didn't realize it until he noticed ...
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An excerpt from Feed Your Brain Lose Your Belly.
by Larry McCleary, MD
As diseases, memory loss and mood disorders appear to have very little in common. But could memory loss (even severe memory loss such as that which occurs in Alzheimer’s disease) and mood illnesses such as depression and bipolar disorder, actually be treated much the same ...
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What physician has not stifled a groan when a patient presents with a chief complaint of "I just don't feel right, Doc."
About this time last year, I had that "not quite right" feeling and vague, seemingly unrelated symptoms ... sweating, mid-morning headaches, and frequent feelings of hunger, which I was accustomed to satisfying with a muffin.
Like most people -- patients and clinicians alike -- I ignored these subtle signals.
One evening, ...
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Do you use Facebook to look for health information?
If you said "yes," and use social networking sites to research your health, you could be in the minority, or majority, depending on which study you read.
Recently, a survey released by the ...
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With little notice, UnitedHealth released a major paper recently considering diabetes in America.
First the bad news: a large portion of our population either has the disease or is pre-diabetic.
Now, the really bad news: diabetes and pre-diabetes rates are going to soar in the coming decade, according to the analysis, in part driven by the obesity crisis.
I’ll return back to the study in a moment, but it underscores a ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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