Hi Arvon,
Thank heavens you're here... Blood Guard is snake oil (the very real doc who supposedly recommends it, did no such thing, but anything can be faked now), and cinnamon's nice, but not going to help. Your pancreas isn't clogged. There might be some fatty tissue around it, and around your liver, but you're making plenty of insulin. That's the problem for a Type 2: We make so much of it, we've become insensitive to it. That takes me to the metformin: You're right, it doesn't tackle the cause. It just treats the symptoms, because at this point, there is no known cure for T2. There are ways to control it, there are ways to become asymptomatic, and there are ways to avoid complications, but there's no magic pill that'll make it go away. Big pharma would have a field day if that were real. Metformin makes you a little bit more sensitive to your own insulin, and it keeps your liver from dumping too much glucose, which is something it tends to do in the morning, when you're stressed, sleepless, sick, give that liver any excuse and it'll dump glucose into your bloodstream. Do excuse it, it's just trying to help, the little deluded soul.
If you want to try and get your blood glucose under control,
https://josekalsbeek.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-nutritional-thingy.html covers some of the basics. I wrote it a couple of eons ago, but it still holds true. Almost all carbs turn to glucose once ingested, so you basically just... Eat fewer carbs. Fewer carbs, less glucose to process, less for your body to contend with. Sounds simple, and it pretty much is. I responded badly to metformin, -brutal side effects- and I didn't do well on gliclazide either, so yeah... Just a dietary change for me. And it's kept me in the normal, non-diabetic range these past 7, almost 8 years. Without medication. So that's maybe an option: diet, diet and meds, just meds... It's all up to you. But do yourself a favour and don't invest in anything other than a blood glucose meter (sadly there's too many T2's for the NHS to hand them out, it's a rare client that gets one), so you know what your blood sugars are doing and how you respond to certain foods, and just go over your grocery list. Anything else is basically a waste of money and hope, when it's as relatively simple as just letting the spuds and buns be.
You're asking the right questions. You're going to be fine.
Jo
