DIABETES PILLS DON’T WORK OVERTIME !!

The credit for this post goes to Mrs. X. She inspired me to write this small post as well resuscitate my blog which has not been updated very frequently off late.

Mrs.X is a cheerful 60+ lady who has been managing her blood sugars decently well. She is on a small dose of Glimepiride and Metformin. She checks her blood sugars regularly. Doctor reviews are perfect and no complications so far. In short she is the ideal patient every Doctor would aspire for.

This cheerful lady went about doing her chores gleefully till that day…

That day…. She got up in the morning as usual and went to the bathroom. Her absentminded maid had forgotten to scrub the bathroom floor. As soon as Mrs.X set foot on the bathroom floor she went sliding to other corner of the bathroom. Her unplanned inertia was cut short by the wall where she had hit her knee. With some help from her daughter she managed to settle down on the bed with liberal supplies of ointments, thailams and how water bag.

3 - IN - 1. ARE WE FOOLING OURSELVES?

Modern medicine has lots of wonders up its sleeves... So do the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the wonders required for maintaining health. The classical methodology of treatment was using monotherapy (simply speaking its one drug at a time). In diabetes this policy doesn’t work. As I have discussed in many of my previous posts Diabetes is multi-factorial and so does the modality of treatment. Combination therapy is the norm in treatment of Diabetes. We need to squeeze out the insulin from the pancreas plus make the squeezed out insulin work better by increasing the body’s sensitivity to insulin plus reduce the carbohydrate absorption from the food we take... Generally I prefer to start treatment by giving individual medicines. Once the patient’s blood sugar is under control we can try combination of tablets. The logic behind combining is to simplify the treatment schedule for the patient. Lesser number of tablets means more patient satisfaction.