We Need Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose Taught

Many government agencies don't want this to happen. Chief among them is the US Dept of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). Other federal agencies also follow suit. This means that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), Certified Diabetes Educators, the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) follow in lock step.

Naturally, the medical insurance industry follow the recommendations of the ADA and AACE. This means that we as patients have to work harder to obtain the test strips to know what our blood glucose levels are for us to manage our diabetes more effectively. Not knowing and operating in the dark is not the way effectively to manage diabetes.

Most blogs by CDEs and RDs never mention using our blood glucose meters with test strips because they don't want us to know how the different foods affect our blood glucose levels. This is part of the reason many people get discouraged and seldom test their blood glucose levels. This almost guarantees that diabetes will become progressive and that the complications will affect the quality of life. Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose (SMBG) is shunned by CDEs and not talked about by RDs.

If it wasn't the leadership of the USDA and the blind following by AND, we might have reason to listen to a few that do teach SMBG. A few CDEs that do not have to worry about other CDEs looking over their shoulders, do teach Diabetes Self-Management Education (DSME) of which SMBG is a part. Many will not even teach DSME because they only believe in mandates and dogma and expect people blindly to follow. With the internet of today, this will only get worse as people learn what following these people will do to damage their health.

At least some people from the Duke University of Nursing at Durham, NC are doing something about what the CDEs are unwilling to accomplish. Read about this in a recent blog here. They are at least reviewing various methods of delivering diabetes self-management education (DSME) via the internet.

Then people with type 2 diabetes and those with prediabetes will have resources to learn about managing their diabetes. Then if the certified diabetes educators want to be exclusive and continue to make it more difficult to become a CDE and for their numbers to grow, we can ignore them and learn on the internet.

The unfortunate part of this is that it is just a study and there is no sources of DSME as such on the internet for easy access. This in one time I sincerely wish that people would put information on the Internet and then do a study instead of studying other studies. Yes, I was honestly thinking that there was a source of DSME on the Internet and that it could be available to all people with type 2 diabetes. While the study details were interesting, that is as far as it was taken.