In Need of Training
The blogosphere is a-buzz about Roosevelt Sims, the 65-year old man who was thrown off of an Amtrak train outside of Williams, AZ for appearing drunk and disorderly when in fact he was recently diagnosed with diabetes and experiencing a low blood sugar.
Thankfully, Mr. Sims was found safe and sound, but hypoglycemia being mistaken for drunkeness is in the news all-too often lately. Ask Doug Burns. Do you think that employers are providing enough training to their staff? Where is the line drawn between what is "part of the job" and simply "being a compassionate human being?"
What do you think?
RELATED: Diabetes Advocacy
Comments
- At 11:40 PM on Thu, Jul 12, 2007 Keyserling wrote:
Any doctor prescribing a diabetic a drug that can cause a low should inform the patient about what the symptoms are and what should be done. In many cause that would prevent what happened to Roosevelt Sims plus lessen the danger that lows cause the person having them!
Chuck
- At 10:29 PM on Thu, Jul 12, 2007 Mary Ann Fawcett wrote:
Am I out in the dark or isn't type 2 diabetis mainly caused because people get overweight and their pancreas just can't make enough insulin to keep up with a person's increased mass?
My son has been type 1 for 14 yrs. and every year the dr.'s are promising new drugs, new delivery systems and even a cure in the near future. My son gave up a long time ago and decided that things weren't really going to change much. He has stopped waiting for the miracles because the pharm. are too busy working for the people who could usually cure there own form 2 if they just lost weight! That may sound mean but I am tired of watching my 26 year old son turning into a 50 yr. old.
Mary Ann - At 11:45 AM on Thu, Jul 12, 2007 Scott wrote:
The bigger question is whether we should be trying to train the masses of people, or whether we should be looking to pharmaceutical companies to resolve this issue that has plagued insulin replacement therapy since 1922. Training is frequently cited as the solution, and while it is one element in the entire equation, that alone is insufficient to resolve this, and the clinical evidence supports this claim. In the 20 years since the DCCT results were published, training has increased dramatically, yet the incidence of these events has climbed dramatically in spite of much better training and education.
Big pharma has almost nothing in their new drug pipelines to treat type 1 diabetes, and its not because insulin is perfect, its because the industry is more interested in the massive type 2 market and would rather invest every dime into new treatments for that condition instead of improving a treatment that has improved relatively little since it was discovered in 1922. There are startup companies, not existing companies, working to resolve this very issue. Notably, I would call attention to a nanotechnology company based in Beverly, Massachusetts called SmartCells, Inc. Why aren't Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly and Sanofi Aventis doing the same thing?!
My question is, was the man wearing a medical ID bracelet that identified diabetes?? Maybe that would have solved this entire problem.