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CHICAGO - Americans with diabetes nearly doubled their spending on drugs for the disease in just six years, with the bill last year climbing to an eye-popping $12.5 billion.
Newer, more costly drugs are driving the increase, said researchers, despite a lack of strong evidence for the new drugs' greater benefits and safety. And there are more people being treated for diabetes.
Yes the increase in diabetes spending is due to both the increase in diagnosis and the rising costs of drugs to treat the condition. Most people, instead of losing enough weight and getting enough exercise, opt for the expensive pills to supplement their efforts.
On the other hand, diabetes used to be a death sentence, and now it is a manageable condition, albeit still with some pretty awful repercussions if the blood glucose is not watched and kept within an acceptable range.
Also, for those who use insulin, the introduction of DNA based insulin injection devices (Lantus, Humalog etc.) in the form of disposable "pens" has greatly increased the cost of that treatment while making self treatment much simpler.
Sadly, the root cause of much of the diabetes is the American diet - which is also increasingly the world's - with its heavy dependence on highly processed food-like substances that we wolf down without thinking.
For non-insulin dependent Type 2 diabetics, Metformin is only $4 . . related thread. Don't really have much sympathy for these pill-popping slackers, because most are unwilling to help themselves by making dietary sacrifices (complying with a low-carb diet).
For non-insulin dependent Type 2 diabetics, Metformin is only $4 . . related thread. Don't really have much sympathy for these pill-popping slackers, because most are unwilling to help themselves by making dietary sacrifices (complying with a low-carb diet).
I have come to the conclusion that the doctors main purpose when they prescribe drugs is to find the most expensive drug they possibly can. Of course people who have been diagnosed recently don't know the difference.
I have been on Glucovance or the generic version for many years and it works just fine. A doctor switched me to a far more expensive drug one time without even seeing my lab results and my sugar went completely out of control. He also switched me from gemfibrozil which is really cheap to something that cost nearly a $100.00 a month. When the lab results came back I had 165 cholesteral and 5.9 A1C. He wrote on the results to stay on Gemfibrozil but I ended up switching doctors to get back my old diabetes medicine.
The whole drug industry is a huge racket as far as I'm concerned and the doctors are on the same team as the drug suppliers. If a person looks after his/her diet properly there isn't even much medication needed. I personally barely take half the prescribed amount and I don't even have to be paronoid about eating.
The doctors far over prescribe. When I was first diagnosed I took the prescribed amount after I got my sugar under control. This was while I was busy trying to lose weight (see sit-ups and leg lifts). I had to eat so much when I took the prescribed amount that even doing exercises I gained 10 pounds in a month. That was when I discovered that I could cut the pills in half and eat a lot less and still get a good A1C and of course meter reading.. Now I'm not recommending everbody just do this. You have eat what you need to not be hungry along with cutting the medication and keep really close track of your sugar with your meter until you get it right.
I don't know if works that way for everyone but if I start to get hungry it is pretty much a cinch my sugar is low. That is how I gained weight. Everytime I got hungry I took my sugar reading and it was low so I would eat something with lots of carbs in it to get my sugar back up. It was just a vicious circle and diabetes was winning. For me that is in the 60 or 70 range. So I would go and have something to eat. Of course I should add that for me (it's different for everyone) if it got even down to 60 I didn't have to take a reading because it was accompanied with the usual shakes, sweating and weak knees feeling.
It would be interesting to know how much newly diagnosed diabetics are paying for meds and how many are prescribed glucovance or it's generic counterpart. I've been on it for over 10 years.
The strips are another whole can of worms. I wonder how the drug companies manage to give everyone a free meter to switch to their strips.
Diabetes has become a colossal money maker for the drug companies. Nobody even wants to cure it. That would be pretty stupid. They just keep reseaching more expensive ways to conrol it.
Saw a documentary just yesterday that said that its as a per centage growing even fast in many emerging economies and that its seen as a result of changing eating habits.Bascially it concluded that once more types of food like fried were affordable people started switching from a fruits and vegatable diet mainly.
Hey how about this idea...take care of yourself properly if you have a family history of diabetes. It's often quite preventable, if you just use your head and do the right thing.
That may be true for Type II. I have been on insulin almost all my life. I have never weighed more than 114 pounds except when pregnant with my two daughters. Heredity played a major role in my case. Fortunately, my grandmother had a good kind of diabetes, so it's easy to control with few complications. I wish I could have known her.
I can tell you that drug companies are all racing to get on the diabetes band wagon. Big money in diabetes drugs due to the lifestyle people are living. (Not in every case, but clearly, many!) A vast number of people are overweight and consume too much sugar! Corn syrup is in everything these days. I just had me some a little while ago.
That may be true for Type II. I have been on insulin almost all my life. I have never weighed more than 114 pounds except when pregnant with my two daughters. Heredity played a major role in my case. Fortunately, my grandmother had a good kind of diabetes, so it's easy to control with few complications. I wish I could have known her.
It was interesting to note you referred to Type 2 as the good kind rather than the better kind. It's better than Type 1 that is. It tells me that you realize that we are better off than many diabetics. I am lucky enough not to be on insulin yet although if I'm around long enough I'm pretty sure I will be. My mother was on insulin for about the last 10 years of her life.
Some people completely panic when they find out they are diabetics. All I have to do is look around and see what other people are suffering through, many of them from birth to death to realize how lucky I am to be a diabetic instead of having their various physical and mental problems that make diabetes almost insignificant to everyone except those who have it. I don't want you to missunderstand what I am saying because I wouldn't wish diabetes on anyone. What I find most amazing is: All a diabetic has to do is eat good food in the right quantities to live a long life the same as that's all a non diabetic has to do. I haven't been on insulin so this may not be true for them. If everyone on earth had to eat and drink the way a type 2 has to who is not on insulin there wouldn't be a single fat person on earth.
I noticed you mentioned that you have never been overweight. Have you suffered much staying slender? I have to sometimes wonder about the over weight aspect because I know so many people who are diabetics who have never been over weight. I've got over 6 decades on this earth and when I was a kid I never knew a single person who was a diabetic. I did know several old people who had legs cut off because they doctored a sore on their foot themselves. I'd bet they had undiagnosed diabetes. What I'm saying is that there are far more cases from heredity than anyone knows about because many people don't even know that they have ancestors who were diabetics. I've forgotten the statistic but I think (I will stand corrected) that about one half or one third of the diabetics in America don't know it. Don't ask me how they can come up with that statistic when no one knows they are diabetics.
There really wasn't much point in diagnosing it in those days because there was no treatment really anyway. All that has changed. Now it has turned into huge money maker to diagnose as many as possible because no matter what a person has almost there is treatments available to stretch out their lives. There wasn't many (as they were called then) old folks' homes because there wasn't very many old people around then compared to now that the family couldn't look after.
It's the same as one hardly heard of Ahlzeimers (spelling?) until the last couple of decades and I never heard of it when I was kid. I did however know several people who displayed all the symptoms. My Grandfather never knew his own name for the last couple of years of his life but he was senile and died at home. This was 40 years ago. There was some really odd, mostly elderly, people around who a few years before were perfectly normal. I think the reason for the huge jump in numbers of all sorts of things now is because they were never diagnosed before. I don't really remember very many people who were over 70 and far less that were over 80. Now I know lots of people over 90.
I've gotten a long ways off the original subject.
I hope you continue to realize there are curses as well as blessings to most situations and continue take good care of yourself. It is sad that you never knew your Grandmother.
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glybride-metformin (glucovance)
