Diabetes For Beginners – Part 1

Diabetes is an illness of which I suspect almost all adults in America are aware. I also suspect that most people know that it has something to do with high blood sugar and that having high blood sugar is a bad thing. Still, I imagine there are a fair few people out there who haven’t really got a lot more understanding of it than that—including some people who have the disease—because they haven’t really had it explained to them in terms they can follow. After all, doctors—of which I am one—don’t often take the time necessary to make sure that their patients fully understand the ins and outs of a disease process. Partly this is because, when one understands something on a very complex level, it seems like it’s going to take serious effort to explain it to someone who doesn’t have the same educational background. However, I think this is a failure of imagination and a bit of mental laziness on our part as doctors. The Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman used to prepare “freshman lectures” about physics subjects when laypeople asked him about topics they didn’t understand. If he found that he couldn’t prepare one, he recognized that failure as an indication that the subject wasn’t well-enough understood! Continue reading “Diabetes For Beginners – Part 1”