Reversed or Cured?

I've switched mine off.
No more medication and more or less eating normally.
I've given up the obvious sugars that I used to have in tead coffee and won't chance going back to that but I'm eating three Yorkies a week now ... I like to push it a bit see what happens and I'm fine.
I have custard and sponge pud and so on.

The only way the hospital would know for sure is if they give you an OGTT. Pretty sure I'd fail one, even though I've had a non-diabetic A1c for the past 5 years. I don't consider myself in remission, reversed or cured. I prefer to say "well controlled". I know if I went back to the way I was eating before diagnosis, it wouldn't take too long to be back to the same place. Not quite sure why people are so obsessed with this subject.

Agree completely with @Indy51 don't matter what you call it, is it under control?

I guess people need something to hang onto, but @Indy51 is dead on right. It's not like a pill or a surgery from which you can recover. You got this for life, a medical miracle notwithstanding.

Personally, I hate the word "cured" as that's just rubbish

Speaking for myself. I'd love to no longer be diabetic because then I would be free to eat whatever I wanted to, in how much quantity and to eat it as often as I want to. i.e. I'd be free.

In reality of course I'd be back eating as I used to. i.e. not eating, feeling faint so grabbing something sugary, feeling high, feeling low, eating more of something sugary, or big bags of crisps and then not eating proper food because I'd filled up on total rubbish. Oh and of course I'd be well on the way to becoming diabetic.

I seem to be addicted to the thought of getting to remission or no longer being diabetic and yet I 'know' that I always will be and I always will have to eat properly/healthily and that I am much, much better and healthier in my new diabetic lifestyle.

I think "cured" and "reveresed" are both misnomers. "Well-controlled" is probably the most accurate way to describe a remission. For me, on a semantic level, for you to say you were "cured" or your diabetes has been "reversed", it would have to mean that you could, for argument's sake, go on an absolute carb bender, eat 3 cakes, crisps, a loaf of white bread with Nutella etc., and that your body, while of course overtaxed, would deal with that as a normal non-diabetic person's would. Anecdotally, I've never met a single diabetic, however well-controlled, who can say that that would be true for them, nor have I seen any studies showing that (and I've read everything by Roy Taylor and Newcastle University). So controlled probably just means controlled unless or until you return to your old ways.

If I eat as I did to control my weight then I am also suppressing my diabetes - I need to stand up to the people who insist that my diet is wrong - say thanks for the advice but you are just totally wrong about how I need to eat because you would make me fat and ill with your idea of a healthy way of eating.
Dr Atkins was right all along - the amount of dense carbohydrate in the modern diet is a killer.

Anthony1738 said:

Hi and Good morning all,

There is much debate around the subject of Type 2 "Cure" or reversal or remission whatever you wish to call it, many people claim to be in remission, or reversed their condition and equally many people claim it cannot be permantly reversed or cured. Mainly health proffesionals make the claim that Type 2 Diabetes is chronic, progressive and with time it will only get worse and will never be cured. I am of the former, last visit to hospital for blood test they came back normal, I know its early days yet and things may change, but for now I am happy and off the medication.

So heres the question............... Supposing I go to a different hospital and ask for a medical examination and my blood test come back normal, as they did the last time, can the medical staff diagnose me as having type 2 diabetes?

Reversed remission or Cured???????

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I would say that if your blood tests come back normal and you have not been using any drugs or low carb diet to bring them down then you would have reversed or cured your diabetes. You would still retain the genetic tendency to it which would kick in once your liver and pancreas fat passed your own personal weight threshold. That would bring you a new case of diabetes. If however you have been using low carb diet to get the BG figures down then your diabetes would just be controlled. If you had a peanut allergy you could control it by not eating any peanuts, but that would not cure it. Same with diabetes and not eating carbs, you are holding it at bay by not challenging it, but not curing it.

Can you have an OGTT (Glucose Tolerance Test) done by your doctor?

Even if you did go to a hospital and have an HbA1c without revealing your status and that test showed non diabetic numbers, what would you gain from that? You know your diagnosis.
Diabetes is a sly fox, it'll creep up on you and bite you in the ****. I'm glad that you can eat what you like but what happens in five years of eating the western diet? Or ten years down the line? You must always, always be wary of complacency, the stakes are too high to gamble on.

Indy51 said:

The only way the hospital would know for sure is if they give you an OGTT. Pretty sure I'd fail one, even though I've had a non-diabetic A1c for the past 5 years. I don't consider myself in remission, reversed or cured. I prefer to say "well controlled". I know if I went back to the way I was eating before diagnosis, it wouldn't take too long to be back to the same place. Not quite sure why people are so obsessed with this subject.

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I totally agree. Another thing I don't understand is why anyone wants to return to their previous way of eating. It isn't just blood glucose affected by too many carbs. It is a load of other health issues, too. Once fully controlled on a low carb diet, there is little harm in a few treats to wet the appetite, which makes eating out easier. I enjoy my low carb lifestyle.

I am not a diabetic.
I have diabetes.
For now I've switched it off eating what I consider to be close to a 1950's pre industrialised food type diet.
Yes I have three bars of chocolate a week (Yorkies) other than that as much sugar as possible has been removed from my diet.
Not that I ever had a sweet tooth anyway.
I'm convinced statins caused my T2 as I really never fitted any kind of profile to be getting diabetes.
No statins is possibly the main reason my T2 no longer shows on any tests.
I never had blood pressure problems till I started taking statins either and now .... no statins no blood pressure problems.
At nearly 6' 3" I was never overweight at 14 stone.
I've shrunk now to around 6' 1".
I started taking Gabapentin main unwanted side effect weight gain ..... I shot to over eighteen stones in a matter of weeks.
I now fluctuate between 15 and 17 stone and don't expect to ever really change that now as I'm more or less inactive due to spinal problems.
I was concerned the inactivity would be bad news T2 wise but nope it's had no effect.
No medication for T2 cholesterol levels or blood pressure.
I think diabetes still remains something of a mystery to the professionals and researches despite all their books and published papers and I base that on few of them can agree on much at all.
This site has been as good as my 100% go to for information experience trials etc and I'm winning just now and have been for a couple of years now I think.
Eat healthily.
Cut out where possible any factories.
Eat fresh when possible.
Organic and local when possible.
Pay more for meat from local village butchers who sell meat that was smiling at you over the fence till recently.
You pay more so eat less.
A five quid chicken in Tesco is around eight quid from my local farmer butcher but tastes so much better and it makes me waste less.
Where possible cut back on medicines pills and potions because they are all toxic.
It's very easy to up the dosages as you need but then forget to ever try reducing the dosages.
I've reduced when and where I can which leaves room to increase at a later date if needed but then reduce again.
I swear some people just love to show me fists full of pills and caps as if they're some kind of hero taking all this ****!
It's not heroic and just because at some point you needed to increase your toxic load of drugs doesn't mean that forever more you can only ever increase increase increase!
Try the decrease route occasionally!

Anthony 1738 is raising an important point, and one that has been bothering me for a while.

At age 59, I was diagnosed in February with Type 2, with an A1C of 8.3. Two months after the diagnosis, having gone on a low-carb diet (losing 10 kilos in the process) and upping the exercise by walking at least 5 miles per day, the A1C was down to 5.5. Six months after the diagnosis, having stuck to the same diet/exercise regimen, my A1C was 4.9.

At that point I asked my doctor whether there was any chance that the initial 8.3 test was erroneous. He told me no, because he had in fact only ordered the test after a routine blood glucose test (done as part of an annual medical checkup) came back high. So there were two tests, both indicating Type 2.

It bothers me that only once, and possibly -- looking forward -- only once in my entire life, have tests shown me to have T2. Yet I understand the medical reasoning, and I understand the posters who say that "you've got this for life" (or so the scientific evidence would indicate).

I was not overweight when diagnosed -- my BMI was 22. Today, my BMI is 19, on the edge of "underweight." However prior to the diagnosis I was drinking 2 to 3 pints of beer and eating a large pack of crisps every day. I guzzled four or five cups of coffee with white sugar. I was fond of bread, pasta, potatos and rice. So the dietary change, post-diagnosis, has been huge.

Really the only way I could find out whether the T2 diagnosis was "wrong" would be to go back for a few months to the pre-diagnosis regimen and see if the A1C goes back up again! Right? And even if the A1C did not go back up again, it presumably would not prove anything about the future. It could take years of "low" A1Cs to prove that the diagnosis was "wrong."

I feel a little churlish saying these things because after all, I seem to be one of the lucky people who can control this thing entirely with lifestyle changes and with no medication.

Concerning the language. I think "remission" or "under control" are appropriate. I don't much like "remission" which is so associated with cancer, so "under control" is my choice. As for the word "cure" it would only make sense if there were such a thing as "temporary" diabetes and apparently there is no medical evidence that such a thing is possible. Once you've got it, you've got it, however tempting it may be to feel "cured."

Grateful said:

Anthony 1738 is raising an important point, and one that has been bothering me for a while.

At age 59, I was diagnosed in February with Type 2, with an A1C of 8.3. Two months after the diagnosis, having gone on a low-carb diet (losing 10 kilos in the process) and upping the exercise by walking at least 5 miles per day, the A1C was down to 5.5. Six months after the diagnosis, having stuck to the same diet/exercise regimen, my A1C was 4.9.

At that point I asked my doctor whether there was any chance that the initial 8.3 test was erroneous. He told me no, because he had in fact only ordered the test after a routine blood glucose test (done as part of an annual medical checkup) came back high. So there were two tests, both indicating Type 2.

It bothers me that only once, and possibly -- looking forward -- only once in my entire life, have tests shown me to have T2. Yet I understand the medical reasoning, and I understand the posters who say that "you've got this for life" (or so the scientific evidence would indicate).

I was not overweight when diagnosed -- my BMI was 22. Today, my BMI is 19, on the edge of "underweight." However prior to the diagnosis I was drinking 2 to 3 pints of beer and eating a large pack of crisps every day. I guzzled four or five cups of coffee with white sugar. I was fond of bread, pasta, potatos and rice. So the dietary change, post-diagnosis, has been huge.

Really the only way I could find out whether the T2 diagnosis was "wrong" would be to go back for a few months to the pre-diagnosis regimen and see if the A1C goes back up again! Right? And even if the A1C did not go back up again, it presumably would not prove anything about the future. It could take years of "low" A1Cs to prove that the diagnosis was "wrong."

I feel a little churlish saying these things because after all, I seem to be one of the lucky people who can control this thing entirely with lifestyle changes and with no medication.

Concerning the language. I think "remission" or "under control" are appropriate. I don't much like "remission" which is so associated with cancer, so "under control" is my choice. As for the word "cure" it would only make sense if there were such a thing as "temporary" diabetes and apparently there is no medical evidence that such a thing is possible. Once you've got it, you've got it, however tempting it may be to feel "cured."

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You have had the same experience that many of us have had with a low carb diet.. you cut out high carb foods, loose some weight and your HbA1c returns to "normal" levels as you have rebooted your hormonal metabolism to work as it should. I'm not so sure about your being "one of the lucky ones" its just that most people don't get told this or find it out for themselves and instead follow their doctors advice to take the pills and almost forget about it. These are the unfortunates whose Type 2 slowly progressively worsens and leads to all the nasties we are warned about.

I agree with your thinking @Grateful because in your case you are controlling it with low carb and your daily 5 mile walk. Stop either of these and things may be different. Really brilliant HbA1c reduction. Well done

I asked this exact question a few weeks ago. I dont think anyone is " obsessed" by it, but us newbies all seem to want to have answer!

After a lot of thinking, I have decided that if my next hba1c is coming down and I eventually find my self at non diabetic levels I will be a well controlled diabetic.

My mum has t2d, as did 5 of her 6 sisters. Her 1 brother is lada. His son is t1 and his pregnant daughter has gestational diabetes. Several of my cousins ( we are a big family, whatever is wrong with us did not affect fertility) are also t2 with a fair few t1 children, but all boys, thrown into the mix. We also have hashimotos hypothyroidism, ms and other conditions usually known by their initials. Whatever the genetic link between autoimmune conditions and diabetes my family obviously have it by the bucket load. I have no idea if I would have eventually become diabetic no matter what I did, but the incidence of it within my mums family( not a single one in my dads equally huge family) seem to indicate that it was always on the cards.

My bgl seems well controlled with diet at the moment (and metformin) but I am counting no chickens. It may be that by cutting carbs I give my pancreas a chance to recover and give my liver a fighting chance. But if I do that i will not do not tempt fate by going back to old habits. In other words, it doesn't matter if I am reversed, cured or well controlled, for me the long term plan is the same. Just carry on without the carbs.

I dont know if there will soon be a proven genetic link with t2d, but I think it highly likely. It will explain why we get thin t2ds who eat well and exercise and overweight sedentary people who never have a bgl go above 7.5. Genetics, combined with a completely new (50 years?)way of eating, better testing and a better educated population mean that far more of us are being diagnosed than just 30 years ago. There are far more of us asking questions and demanding good answers. If there is a genetic ink and you have developed the disease, can you ever really be cured? ( I dont have any answer to this, what do you all think?)

So although I would love to be called cured I am not holding my breath.