Diabetes Care

The way a people treat the body politics, is the way their medicine treats the body. Our country is constantly at war: war with other countries, a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on cancer, a war on diabetes. When it comes to diabetes, sugar is the enemy and we will stop at nothing to eradicate high blood sugar without thinking about why it was high in the first place.

Sugar is the enemy and dietitians aligned with the diabetes community recommended artificial sweeteners in place of sugar and honey and even fruit (!). It turns out that artificial sweeteners stimulate the same hormones that sugar does but to a greater degree and can actually cause you to gain more weight and experience inflammation.

To be sure, refined, white sugar is not healthy for you (but honey and fruit can help diabetics control their blood sugar, especially apples, pineapples and lemons). And for a diabetic, long term uncontrolled high blood sugar can lead to blindness, limb loss and kidney failure. But just using anti-blood sugar pills like Metformin have short term risks and may have long term health risks to patients like an increased risk of cancer or alzheimer's disease in susceptible people.

Since 2006, an expert panel recommended aggressive and rapid blood sugar control. According to a recent New York Times article, some of the experts had received money from pharmaceutical companies that make these very products that lower blood sugar. What is more, other experts (no strings attached to big pharma) had warned that there would be consequences to lowering blood sugar too quickly--and low and behold there was, like seizures and death--which led to the group pulling their expert recommendations.

Everything the body does has purpose at first, but over time if it gets stuck in a certain pattern, it no longer is helpful, but becomes harmful. For example, if you pound on a soda machine to get your money back, that makes sense, But if you do that for 6 hours with no money back and break your hand, that pounding no longer was helpful and became harmful.

The endobiogenic approach considers why a person has developed insulin resistance over time and what the body is trying to achieve. In my practice my goal is to balance the hormonal influences that caused the unhealthy management of sugar in the blood and support the body's ability to regain its natural healing power. Most the time, this can be done with some sensible dietary changes, herbal teas and medicinal plants. No strings attached to big pharma.