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I suggest that you invest in Richard Bernstein's book Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. It is very readable, full of useful advice and the bible of many on this forum.

It is quite hard to interpret this sort of experiment. Your morning fasting test gives you a rough indication of how good your overall control was the previous day. Therefore it is a good general indicator of your progress. The fact that yours is on the way down means that you are getting on...

Do you have any direct experience with the Atkins diet, or are you basing this upon the vilification that has been piled upon it by parts of the medical profession and some of the popular press? I don't have any experience with Atkins myself, so I am fairly neutral about it. What I do know...

I suspect that part of the reason is a fallacious concern about a risk of CJD. It has been suggested that vCJD might be transmitted by bovine insulin (such as Hypurin). This is particularly daft - partly because bovine insulin is quite unusual these days, and partly because no one has ever...

Hmm... this is mostly fairly bad advice, although I have seen much worse! It is essentially the standard "high carb" diet, as recommended by medical textbooks, and espoused by Diabetes UK and the ADA. The difference is that it adds a lot of new age hokum about everything from herbs to crystals...

It is possible that your pancreas is in a very poor state, and if that is the case then I am afraid that in the end insulin is likely to be the only option. However, for most T2s, so long as you get it under control while you still have some functioning beta cells then it is possible to manage...

There are a few jobs that are exempt from the disability discrimination act - if you are, for example, a bus driver, an airline pilot, a soldier or a fireman then you will have problems. Basically, occupations when an unexpected hypo could put other people at risk. However, Sarah is right for...

Expect ups and downs - even with a fasting test. The purpose of testing is to initially keep an eye on your condition and make sure that it is improving, and then later on to help you learn about how different foods effect you so that you can fine tune your diet. Sometimes it will be higher...

If you are going to hang out on this forum (and I suggest that you do) then you will need to be bilingual for BG! We Brits use mmol/l whereas Americans (and I guess in Thailand) the units are mg/dl. In which case you might find this neat online Blood Sugar Converter useful.

If you are interested in giving the Atkins diet a go, then there are many books on it (try Amazon, or your local bookshop). Atkins Nutritional Inc. also have a web site at: http://www.atkins.com. One word of warning, though, they are a large multinational company that sell a very wide range of...

As I suggested earlier, ask to be referred to a specialist. It is no slight on your family doctor - no one can expect her to have extensive experience with specialist areas like this, that is why specialists exist. It really does sound as though your case is quite unusual. As a diet...

There have been reports of vasodilation caused by sunbeds triggering hypos - these have been dubbed "sunbed seizures". I guess that diabetics, especially T1s, are likely to be more vulnerable to this than non-diabetics. However, that is a rare adverse reaction. I would worry much more about...

There is nothing special about Truvia, it is just a brand name for one particular stevia formulation - there are many others. If you are interested in trying stevia then there are several things that you should be aware of. Firstly, there are some health concerns. Personally, having read...

Oh I don't doubt you for a moment. It is just sad that so many people are either unwilling or incapable of helping themselves. What is worse than sad is that the attitudes of such people make life more difficult for those of us who are willing and indeed eager to do whatever it takes. That is...

My GP and two nurses at that practice have all been adamant that they consider testing to be a "bad thing" for T2s. The cynic in me is convinced that cost is at the root of this. However, the reason that they gave was that in their experience many people test without doing anything useful with...

Interesting. Was this a real life meeting, or an online forum? If the latter, is it still active? This is something that I would be very interested in earwigging!

I am afraid that no one on here can tell you what your doctor will say about treatment. Maybe you need different medication, or maybe you need insulin - that is something for you and your doctor to discuss. What I can say is that if you get moaned at then you need a different doctor! You need...

It does sound as though you have got through the worst of this now, and that is good news indeed. Change is never going to be easy, and it is a pain to have it imposed on you like this. However, it is important to concentrate on positive things rather than dwell on the negative. Although it...

All very good questions. The only one I can hazard a guess at is: I think they are the mythical "great and good" :wink: They may well have professional members (I hope that they do), but they are primarily lay political bodies. I have a relative who is a trustee on a PCT (not mine, he is in a...

I wrote a somewhat detailed description of HbA1c in an old thread, but in a nutshell it provides quite a good estimate of your average BG over the previous three months (to the extent that you can calculate what this average will have been). If it is not as low as you expected there are a...