Functional Medicine doctor Chris Kresser wrote an article recently about how in the US, conventional medicine has failed with diabetes after he read an article called “Diabetes Control Has Stalled Across U.S”. Here are some sobering facts he shared from that article:
“The investigators found that one in four adults with diabetes was not diagnosed, and nearly one in three was not receiving appropriate care for diabetes.
Our results suggest that, despite major advances in diabetes drug discovery and movement to develop innovative care delivery models over the past two decades, achievement of diabetes care targets has not improved in the United States since 2005.”
Diabetes News Globally Isn’t Great Either
The news globally doesn’t seem great either. For instance in the UK 1 in 10 people aged 40 and over now has type two diabetes according to a study that was released in 2019. 4.7 million people here are living with diabetes in total, and 90% of them are type 2 and 10% is a type 1. Diabetes diagnoses in the UK have more than doubled in 20 years according to another source. Whereas moving to South Africa, they have the highest proportion of adult diabetics on the African continent and the greatest number of deaths due to the disease. South Africa has in fact seen a 137% increase of diabetics since 2017. So from the first world to a third world country, this highlights no current model of conventional care is working.
The Solution Is Simple
Chris Kresser’s solution is simple: focus on diet and lifestyle to prevent and treat diabetes. But instead, conventional care is not focussed on this aspect and that is why diabetes care is failing globally. And yes, sure, some people are ‘predisposed to diabetes through their genes’, however, this genetic predisposition is not switched on without environmental factors like poor diet, physical inactivity and sleep deprivation (to name a few).
A better model of care for type 2 diabetics is to hold off on prescribing drugs immediately and first offer health coaching with someone like myself as one example (a functional medicine nutritionist) and it would be a game-changer if this was covered by medical insurance as more people in need could be reached!
During the coaching sessions, together with the patient’s input and feedback, we would work together as a team to ensure the client’s diet is improved, their level of physical activity is increased, stress is managed, drinking, taking drugs or smoking is dealt with and more sleep is achieved.
Functional Blood Tests Are Valuable
Also, for best results two sets of functional blood tests would be taken, one at the beginning and then one after 3 months, (it would be ideal if medical aids could also cover this) to assess for all improvements along with patients feedback after implementing the drug-free health plan.
Here we would then see if a patient truly needs medication or if they were heading in the right direction and their blood tests would help us see this. If improvements were being made then we would keep going with the patient-centred whole-body health plan without drugs and the patient could not only adequately manage their type 2 diabetes but also for some, complete reversal is possible.
