Have you been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes? Well, gather around, here is the latest and greatest in technology for managing your type 2 diabetes and to help in the lowering of your blood sugar levels.
But is this where you really want to go? In March 2010 the FDA, the United States Food and Drug Administration, gave approval to a combination of an electronic glucose sensor and an implanted insulin pump for continuous treatment of "difficult" non-insulin dependent diabetes also known as type 2 diabetes.
If the notion of using an implanted insulin pump for treating non-insulin dependent diabetes seems strange, read on.
The new combined diabetes management system sets the insulin pump to deliver 1 unit of insulin for every gram of carbohydrate consumed.
So, type 2 diabetics consuming the American Diabetes Association diet, eat around 200 grams of carbohydrate a day, so this means the pump would deliver 200 units of insulin.
A healthy person's pancreas creates between 30 and, in very very large people, 100 units of insulin a day.
Insulin itself causes insulin resistance as the cells try to protect themselves from the torrents of incoming glucose.
The new "management" system guarantees that the type 2 diabetics who use it, will need it for life.
Yes, that's it, for life.
And, if one day a person with type 2 diabetes who has this style of an electronic continuous glucose sensor combined insulin pump implanted, then has an upset stomach and doesn't feel like eating...
or perhaps they overindulge at a festive meal...
it guarantees their blood sugar levels will either run too high or too low for days.
Or weeks...
or months on end.
In this system, the objective of management is knowing with certainty that their type 2 diabetes is out of control.
Now, not everything about insulin treatment for type 2 diabetics is bad.
In the early stages of type 2 diabetes, injected insulin...
that is the correct type and in the correct dosage...
can help in reversing type 2 diabetes.
Actually it can give your overworked pancreatic beta cells a rest.
This system, however, does nothing to rejuvenate your pancreatic function.
The risk of many kinds of equipment failure is also raised, not to mention the time involved during your day to calibrate the combined implanted insulin pump and glucose sensor.
It will need to be calibrated several times a day by you, and you will also be required to take several finger stick tests.
The progress in combining the insulin pump and continuous glucose sensor could one day, in the not to distant future, result in the manufacture of an artificial pancreas which could be beneficial to both type 1 and type 2 diabetics.