AADE's Seven Self-Care Behaviors Handouts

The American Association of Diabetes Educators has seven self-care behaviors handouts. As handouts go, they are too short and missing a lot of information. They did do a good thing by having them in Spanish, but not directed to any specific dialect.

Since I am not a member of AADE, this may be the reason I am not able to download any of the handouts. I can save them as individual PDF files so that I have them available when I need them, so this may be what they are talking about. Not the most intuitive. However, I have not found a way to download all of them at once.

In her article on Diabetes Health, Donna Tomky did lay out a good definition of the seven self-care behaviors handouts. So I will repeat them here:

“Healthy Eating - Learning to make healthy food choices by paying attention to nutritional content and portion sizes
Being Active - Recognizing the importance of physical activity and making a plan to start moving today
Monitoring - Learning to check, record, and understand blood glucose levels and other numbers important to diabetes self-care
Taking Medication - Remembering to take medications as prescribed and understanding how they affect the body and diabetes management
Problem Solving - Gaining skills to identify problems or obstacles to self-care behaviors and learning how to solve them
Reducing Risks - Understanding the potential complications associated with diabetes and taking steps to prevent developing them
Healthy Coping - Developing healthy ways of dealing with challenges and difficult situations related to diabetes”

I was intending to do a blog on each of the items above, but after reading and rereading them, I will only put myself in a depression writing about them. It is depressing enough reading them when one realizes the opportunities lost in providing educational value in the handouts. Yes, there is some quality information, but since this is only a website and they cannot bill a reader, I can understand why there is so little information.

Why does the AADE have to misrepresent the USDA plate and leave the cup for milk completely off? Yes, I disapprove of the USDA plate because it is done to promote agricultural products heavily, but its use on this site leaves it completely unbalanced.  Nutritional balance is sadly lacking in the USDA plate, but I am appalled by the way the AADE represents it at the end of the “healthy eating” handout – unhealthy is the best word I can use for print.

Please take time to explore the handouts here.