Diabetes Diabetes Basics

People with Diabetes: Five Smart Questions to Ask Your Doctor

Introduction

Often when I discuss diabetes diagnoses with my patients, I am surprised by how calm they seem. True, my patients are adults, and most of them have been confronted with a number of other chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure or hypertension, asthma, or high cholesterol. But the truth is that they are not calm. They are simply numb. These individuals think of diabetes as just one more medical burden. Often, individuals feel fearful and hopeless in the face of a diabetes diagnosis because they are not educated about the disease.

Educating yourself about diabetes will not only make you feel less fearful, it will empower you. Knowledge enables you to be an active participant in your care.

This article explores five questions that all people with diabetes should ask. You do not need to find the answers to all these questions on the first visit with your healthcare provider. Ask them gradually, as you are ready to absorb the answers. Don’t wait too long though. Diabetes control should not be postponed.
 

What is Diabetes?

You may be surprised to learn that many patients who have had diabetes for many years are unable to answer this question.

You can't expect to make a long-term commitment to diabetes-care without knowing the basics about the disease. When a doctor recommends that you ‘change your diet’, and ‘take your medications’, it is important to understand how and why these recommendations will help you. Getting familiar with the disease itself is the first step to becoming an educated and active participant in your own health care.

Learning with medical language
People learn in different ways. For some, learning about the medical aspects of a disease and how it affects the body is the easiest way to conceptualize it. If you are one of these people, it may be most useful for you to learn about how insulin regulation works. It may help you to learn that diabetes is a disease in which the pancreas doesn’t produce insulinLearning with common language
Others prefer to learn about a disease using more common words and concepts. You may be an individual that simply needs to know that your body ‘doesn’t use sugar, the body’s main energy source, the way it should’. This explanation will help you understand why you need to modify your dietary intake, or the ‘sugar’ that you put in your body.

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