Also any thoughts re libre V Dexcom If I end up going self funded?
Hi,
@CDM9 ,
@EllsKBells kindly tagged me in re the blucon thingy, so thought I'd chip in a bit on that.
Libre is pretty damned good on it's own but the factory calibration can often be a bit sketchy and there's no alerts. Even so, you'll still learn bucket loads from being able to see a more or less live 8 hour graph compared to the tiny snapshots strips alone give.
If you're not having major hypo issues, libre is probably good enough. Even without alerts, it is still very good for keeping in range: daytime, you get a heads up on drops well in advance provided you scan regularly; nightime, you can check each morning how basal worked out and adjust if necessary.
There's an admirable simplicity about it. There's been many old school posters of the, "nah, strips are good enough for me" variety who have been won over by the insights it gives.
It also teaches some very good lessons about calibration. Dexcom is manually calibrated a couple of times a day - do a bg test when stable, enter that reading into dexcom to tell it when it gets a raw number x from the sensor, it means y as a bg level. Libre is factory calibrated to avoid that, but, well, how do I say this diplomatically without getting sued by Abbott, it's sometimes a bit sketchy. So you learn by a bit of testing to sort of calibrate in your head, so that when libre says x, it actually means x +/- a bit.
Learning to do that in your head is like learning to do arithmetic on paper instead of using a calculator. It makes calibrating proper cgm like dexcom much more effective.
These tools are good, but worthless if not properly calibrated against blood. They're not plug-and-play. If you calibrate at the wrong times, e.g. when levels are rapidly changing, or too often, they become increasingly inaccurate.
I was delighted with libre but I hankered for alerts (although to be honest, I'm fed up with them now!). I didn't like the start up costs of dexcom, the attachment method, the size of it, the replacement transmitter costs.
Turned out there's a small company
www.ambrosiasys.com set up by an ex-Abbot employee which makes a small reusable transmitter, blucon, which sits on top of libre sensor, reads every 5 mins and sends to a phone app.
Their inhouse app, linkblucon, ain't that great, but an open source app, xDrip+, was tweaked in September 2017 to take blucon data.
xDrip+ was originally called dexdrip: dexcom users felt the official app was lacking, so they wrote a better one, and it evolved into xDrip+. Many dexcom users prefer it to the official app. It has pedigree. Being open source and free, they have introduced some very sophisticated features which dexcom would have trouble getting FDA approval for.
Now that it has been tweaked to take data from blucon, it turns libre into full on cgm which, in my view, is as accurate as dexcom - calibrating xdrip+ makes it so. And alerts. For £100 for the blucon transmitter which is warranted for a year but will likely last way longer as it's just a bit of electronics. Only downside is it's not waterproof so needs to be taken off for showers, but no big deal.
I started a thread about it here which gives more details:
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/getting-hypo-alerts-with-libre-blucon-and-xdrip.127195/
CGM changes your mindset: make small adjustments on the fly; don't leave correction doses till meals - you can see situations starting to develop so take small steps proactively to head them off before they get messy. You can gently steer direction, instead of taking a sledgehammer to it after going out of range.
There's a couple of good books which explain the difference in approach, both on kindle: Sugar Surfing, by Stephen Ponder, and Beyond Fingersticks by William Lee Dubois.
Have fun, cgm of any type makes this unpredictable game much easier!