Diane Abbott T2

dbr10 said:

We should give her the benefit of the doubt. It is what we sould expect for ourselves.

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100% agree, that's why it is so sad to see comments like this on here.
"she is using it as an excuse for her lacklustre performance."

I think there some comments on this thread that are in very bad taste. The thread was supposed to be about Dianne Abbots diabetes not an excuse to **** her off in her political life or give our own views on politics. I do not think she was making excuses for what has been called here her "lack lustre" performance but she was probably feeling pretty ill at the time because for a while she had lost control of her diabetes

I see Diane Abbot is now feeling better and back in her old job. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...eturns-to-shadow-cabinet-peston-a7795636.html It is a shame about the people who want to pillory someone for being ill. I as a diet controlled T2D fully sympathise with how she must have felt. How about we all have a go at something positive for everyone? Improving life for people with diabetes by discussing ways of targetting the people whose policies are increasing diabetes internationally. http://www.euronews.com/2017/06/16/beware-the-food-barons to find the reference to diabetes press ctrl F and put the word diabetes in the find box. Is the writer right to point the finger at companies going about their lawful business of increasing profits and shareholder value?

badcat said:

I think you are making a couple of big, and incorrect, assumptions because you know nothing about her individual condition / treatment
1) insulin is the only thing that causes hypos - wrong
2) insulin is only given late on in the process - wrong
I was diagnosed over 20 years ago and immediately put on insulin which it took several months to get off ( the fact that the doctor didnt believe my dob and was convinced i was 10 years younger than my age didnt help)
After the period on insulin i was put on gliclizide and have been on it ever since. In the first year or so I experienced hypos with readings as low as 1.8 mmol for which I had to keep a supply of glucose tablets and to have periodic intravenous glucose

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Ultimately you are right , I know ****** all about her, just that she seems to be having some troubles and if any thing said re diet is helpful to her then good.

You seem to be saying that not only did you get insulin very quickly - which you later didn't need - ( was that because of dietary changes or something else ?) , but also that the drugs you got thereafter also caused hypos in the immediate aftermath of those insulin injections. You have also said nothing about your own dietary regime .

My own doctor recommended I should go on insulin in August 2015 because of my very high blood sugar readings. He gave that advice without even suggesting I should have my insulin levels tested and at the time I knew nothing about the fact that it even needed to be.

I refused and went low carb instead - because I am an action oriented research type individual who happened to come across a single piece of medical research that spoke to me and my situation. It would have been all too easy to listen to the doctor and go with his recommendation. Had I done so then ALL of my subsequent research would have been in the context of already needing the drugs and being afraid to stop taking them.

Recent blood tests show that my own underlying insulin whilst now in the "normal range " is still too high not too low. As it happens I took a bit of a break from both dieting and low carbing this week and whilst I have put a couple of kilos on - at no point has my blood sugar increased beyond 7.8 but then I have been fat adapted for a few months now and having eaten far too many carbohydrates this week, I still remain in ketosis - which is itself quite remarkable.

There are a lot of people here, who appear to have at least got under more control without drugs via some variation of diet - be that low carb, fasting or very low calorie- whichever suits the individual best. In those instances we do not appear to report the hypo's that seem to be in the short term as dangerous as hyper is in the long term.

All too often the first treatment given is drugs - of whatever variety with consequent problems re digestion and/or severely fluctuating glucose levels.

I fail to see how anyone can know the extent to which they were actually necessary if they are actually started on the day of diagnosis as opposed to having at least tried to deal with it without drugs first unless of course the situation is already critical.

Of course for some of us, the answer will be that yes drugs are necessary - but it is better to know that that is because the various natural options are failing for medical reasons as opposed to from a lack of knowledge on the part of the sufferer and possibly inadequate advice from the practitioner.

All drugs have side effects no matter how good they are at dealing with something.

Left to my own doctor I too would have been dealing with hypo's , glucose tablets, and some combination of various drugs to help me reduce blood sugars. I would have had no idea that reducing carbs to 30g per day would have exactly the same effect for me personally.

People talk about how bariatric surgery can be such an effective tool, and that blood sugar comes down con-commitant with the surgery - it also happens to follow a period of fasting in preparation for the surgery followed by a lifetime of severely restricted food both things we receive advice about here.

Our current treatment protocols often assume that individuals simply cannot adapt their lifestyles to suit their situation. That may well be true for some for any number of very valid reasons - but surely everyone should at least be given the benefit of the doubt on day one?

Maybe drugs will be necessary eventually for me too but so far it has not been and I have had neither hypers nor hypos in the last few months - hence wanting to pass that info on. Yes I am one of life's busybodies - but only ever in the hope that it will help someone.

To my mind there are two fundamental issues at interplay here
1) Personal Income is pretty much about DOING something for most of us no matter what job we do. DOING something makes all of us feel useful ( me included) .
2) All of us would like to see a quick resolution to our problem ( me included)

As such any advice that involves STOPPING DOING something and seeing how our body responds over the ensuing three months in preference to starting to DO something else TODAY - is likely to be the second order of priority for all parties - patient and adviser alike.

badcat said:

when i was first diagnosed i was in hospital with a raging infection related to a gp who had f***cked up bigtime when I went with an infected cut on my foot ( he wouldnt test me for diabetes although I asked several times, then told me my foot going black was just bruising and a "really good sign" - no it was gangrene and I nearly lost my leg becauseof it - had to spend over 4 months in hospital)
Initially the traditional diabetic diet of low fat, unrefined carbs / moderate carb reduction combined with extensive testing of what effect individual foods had on BG level followed by adjustments to diet based on the results worked ok for 10 - 12 years to the extent where a consultant said " diabetes always gets worse but yours is getting better ?????) My regime did eventually begin to fail at which point there was talk about changing meds but I wasnt keen on that as the (rare) side effects listed on the info sheet for the suggested med included pancreatitis / pancreatic cancer so I initially went low carb then ketogenic to control BG readings. I have tried no meds but that doesnt keep things within target - a low dose of medication and aggressive dietry changes do. I currently follow ketogenic diet with 24 /18 / 32 hr fasts thrown in for good measure, I still have occasional hypos but rarely anything below 3 and some hypers but rarely above 10.
I am still on the same dose of gliclazide as I was 20 years ago leading them now to question whether I have Type 2 or monogenic diabetes ( I was diagosed age 39 and told id been diabetic for at least 15-20 years prior to diagnosis)

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Thanks for the info Badcat.

Knowing what you now know, do you wish someone had suggested aggressive diet changes day one LCHF, fasting or VLCD instead of going through the intervening stages first? - it seems to me that that is the " interfering " point.

So many doctors approach this from a softly softly angle - with a bit of improvement to diet and a bit of medication followed by more and more aggressive medication regimes. Some to tackle it more aggressively up front, with heavier medication and more volatility . The occasional few with LCHF, Fasting or VLCD which seems to provide the most benefit and the least drugs.

Of course no-one other than Diane can know what she actually knows about all this, but I don't think anything I've said is actually not compatible with your own experience.
I'm glad you have your own issues under good control.

Diane made a couple of positive points on BBC1 this morning encouraging non-diabetics to test for Type 2 and stating that Type 2 is manageable. She thanked people for the thousands of messages of support.

Mbaker said:

Diane made a couple of positive points on BBC1 this morning encouraging non-diabetics to test for Type 2 and stating that Type 2 is manageable. She thanked people for the thousands of messages of support.

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I saw that. Diane has a real opportunity to make a difference if diet changes make a big difference to her. - whatever diet she chooses to try.

douglas99 said:

I doubt it'll get anywhere, have you read this thread?
Even posters on here openly state she's fine, and diabetes is an excuse.
What chance has our community got, if those within it criticise her?

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Sometimes criticism is not a bad thing..............I personally believe that the T2 is being used as an excuse for poor preparation. The first time, ok, yeah we all get it wrong. But you learn from that and in the middle of an election campaign you **** well make sure you learn from it and don't let it happen again! The interview on Sky regarding the anti-terrorism report was embarrassing. Just admit you haven't read it! I've had hypos where I start to talk rubbish but that wasn't the case in that interview. That was a politician caught out and unwilling to admit it.

Thinking about guests on TV shows and getting ready for the show would involve, make up, meet and greet, a quick chat with the presenter's, the green room, cup of tea or a cold drink. So, surely in the time that elapsed from her arriving and for her to go on air, she would of had ample time to check her diabetes BS, ( also when she awoke that morning) unless she doesn't have a meter, which I would imaging she does have ?

serenity648 said:

If Dianne Abbot has been given the standard NHs dietary advice, then she isnt going to be able to fully control her diabetes to the best of her ability, regardless of how much monitoring she does.

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First thing I would do would be to google everything I could about type 2 diabetes and question things, that way, get lots of advice and then adapt. So many helpful links and forums like this one.

I just found at least 8 links, I wish the internet was around when I was diagnosed , it would of been a godsend

I found this site almost immediately, within a day or two of diagnosis. It wasn't rocket science. Google brought it up.
The problem some folk may have is they find the other site first, (the .org one), and then they could be in real trouble.

I found this site quite quickly after diagnosis too. I looked through the recent posts but non of them applied to me, so I thought the forum wasn't for me and so it was a few months later that I bothered to look again and finally joined up.

I've been away and may have missed a post mentioning this, but I wonder if she is taking statins? Even after only a few tablets, memory can be affected very badly. Someone I knew lost her car and quite simply couldn't function within a week of starting them. She stopped taking them and recovered quickly.