How much am I worth?

[Deleted member 555902]

I went to the GP a year ago. Old fat bloke with low testosterone blah blah blah. A dozen blood tests later, and I am a type 2. We have all heard that story before. But what has amazed me is the number of people that feed off me being a diabetic.

First up, the GP surgery ( not so much the doc but the NHS system) calls, and they want me to sign up for a voluntary diabetic awareness course. Not owned and run by the NHS but an outsourced company. I have to go to an optician's for eye tests. the foot doctor for foot tests, I get random companies calling me telling me I have been signed up for this online course and that online system and so forth.

I just get the feeling there is a rath of companies set up to milk money out of the NHS system in the name of diabetes, and I am a walking cash cow!!!
There feels like a whole load of ideas, plans, and programmes outside the NHS umbrella that also want a piece of me. I don't need an arm-mounted thingy for blood sugars, but I have been offered several I can buy directly off prescription for a discounted starter's price. extra helpful tests done just for me (for a fee). Training, testing, and treating herbs and tablets. There's a whole world waiting for me to drop into type 2. if I drop into type 1, does the bumpf get bigger, and am I a bigger cash cow?

What am I worth to these firms?

 

[Jaylee]

Hi,

From a T1 perspective.
All my stuff is done under the NHS.

 

[KennyA]

I went to the GP a year ago. Old fat bloke with low testosterone blah blah blah. A dozen blood tests later, and I am a type 2. We have all heard that story before. But what has amazed me is the number of people that feed off me being a diabetic.

First up, the GP surgery ( not so much the doc but the NHS system) calls, and they want me to sign up for a voluntary diabetic awareness course. Not owned and run by the NHS but an outsourced company. I have to go to an optician's for eye tests. the foot doctor for foot tests, I get random companies calling me telling me I have been signed up for this online course and that online system and so forth.

I just get the feeling there is a rath of companies set up to milk money out of the NHS system in the name of diabetes, and I am a walking cash cow!!!
There feels like a whole load of ideas, plans, and programmes outside the NHS umbrella that also want a piece of me. I don't need an arm-mounted thingy for blood sugars, but I have been offered several I can buy directly off prescription for a discounted starter's price. extra helpful tests done just for me (for a fee). Training, testing, and treating herbs and tablets. There's a whole world waiting for me to drop into type 2. if I drop into type 1, does the bumpf get bigger, and am I a bigger cash cow?

What am I worth to these firms?

Hi, and welcome. It doesn't quite work that way (I used to do some of this sort of thing for a living). What happens is that national clinical targets are set by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). The government puts these into force, and the healthcare system is supposed to achieve the targets both for individual patients and for patients as a group. So GPs (using diabetes as the example) get a payment for setting up and maintaining a register of all their patients with diabetes. They also get payments for foot examinations, referrals to education programmes, treatment with statins, achieving blood pressures under 140/90 etc. There are currently (for 24/25) nine direct diabetes targets in all. The payments are linked to percentages of patients, so what happens with an individual patient doesn't make a lot of difference at all.

Some of them (like the education programmes) can often be run at less cost to the NHS by paying an outside company to do it, than if NHS personnel delivered the courses. Most practices on their own probably won't have enough "newly diagnosed" patients at any one time, so it makes sense for practices through local Integrated Care Boards to run joint courses with maybe 25 or 30 people attending each course rather than two or three. How that's done in practice is a decision taken by local GPs, and they won't be spending any more money than they have to. All of the cost of these NHS services is paid for by the taxpayer through the financial settlement the Government allocates to the NHS every year.

It is probably worst for hassle just after diagnosis. They want to get you examined for everything straight away and all the letters come at once. It does settle down and eg I'm now on yearly appointments, being five years in remission, and hardly ever get contacted.

Unfortunately there's nothing official or controllable about the stuff you will get advertised on the internet and on social media in particular. As soon as their algorithms work out that you've got an interest in diabetes - google searches, being on this forum, all sorts of things tell them that - the adverts start. I've never been advertised anything remotely useful - I found things like Gentle Grip socks and SRSLY low carb through recommendations on this forum, rather than adverts. Most of the adverts are selling miracle cures or devices that don't work, and are just scams. If you don't fall for them, they won't make any money out of you.


One other thing - Type 2 doesn't become Type 1 - they are two completely separate conditions. It's possible but rare to have both, I don't know anyone this has happened to. Some Type 2 people need additional injected insulin, but that does not make them Type 1, which is an auto-immune condition.

 

[VashtiB]

Hello and welcome @Hedgrerowpete

It can really feel like that when you get diagnosed. The fact is, as I understand it, the number of people with this diagnosis is increasing all the time. If the condition is not managed the consequences can be significant and expensive for the medical system. If it is managed the costs are less. So everyone is attracted to anything which seems to offer a way of managing it. So if you get an feet issues found early it's easier to keep an eye on them rather than deal with an amputation for example.

However, as @KennyA said this tends to settle down after a while.

Having said that a meter or a cgm is a really useful tool that allows the person with the condition to have the information to make choices that can help manage the condition. If the feedback from the meter is that a certain meal caused a big rise in your levels it's easy to say I can't eat that again or at least it needs to be very seldom. So it can give information before there are any symptoms. I highly recommend testing your levels.

Welcome and good luck.