Yesterday, I responded to the question about "things you wish your doctors knew about diabetes and the daily task of living [with it] by mentioning that many healthcare providers' knowledge of diabetes is incomplete and/or out of date. Rather than be a part of the problem, I've proposed a first-draft solution — some things I would put into a Continuing Medical Education (CME) syllabus to fill in some of those gaps. I'm sure I'm missing rather a chunk of stuff, but then again, this is a first draft.

If I were to develop a syllabus to fill in the gaps in professional diabetes education, as I perceive they exist today, these are some of the things I would consider:

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On dLife's Facebook page, the following question is posed:

There is no doubt that doctors are key to success in maintaining your diabetes. However, not all doctors have diabetes. There are some things that even doctors do not know or understand about living with diabetes. What are some of the things you wish your doctors knew about diabetes and the daily task of living with the illness?

The responses range from issues of doctors not spending enough time with PWDs, giving incorrect information, doctors believing the information we gather about our diabetes is solely for their use (and not ours!), and having poor bedside (or examination room) manners.

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In response to Mike Durbin's Diabetes Blessings Week, I've put together some first "thanks" we might have given upon our diagnoses...

The DKA Survivor — Thank goodness I'm alive!

Symptomatic Solly — Thank goodness we know what it is!

The New Type 1 (adult) — Thank goodness there's insulin!

The New Type 2 — Thank goodness I don't need insulin!

Type 1 (at Thanksgiving dinner) — Thank goodness I have insulin, so I don't have to say "no" to anything!

 

Just a Touch of "The Sugar" — Thank goodness there's a pill for that!

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There's an old joke about two blind men who, having never before encountered an elephant, are asked to describe it based on what they can touch of it. The one man, brought to the elephant's trunk, has a completely different description from the other, who was brought to its hind leg.

There's a famous experiment, proposed as a test for artificial intelligence, in which a person queries two entities about themselves and tries to determine which of the two is a man, and which is a machine.

And then there's the famous "black box" which, in theory, creates solutions from inputs, without any single entity knowing what it does to "create order from chaos". The black box is, in other words, magick.

Each of these requires that someone (or some thing) create a definition and a solution to a problem based on insufficient, empirical data.

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What would you say if you had the symptoms of a common medical condition, but if after a year, none of the usual therapies worked?

What would you say if your doctor insisted that he had correctly diagnosed the disease as something chronic, but not necessarily debilitating, and was giving you medicines that all should be working?

Now, what would you say if there was a less-common form of that medical condition that had all the same symptoms, but was caused by a completely different disease -- one that was immediately life-threatening -- and which required a different form of therapy? What would you say if your doctor refused to consider the possibility of that less-common disease? And what would you say if there were two common tests that could confirm whether or not the less-common diagnosis was correct, but your doctor refused to order them?

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Wednesday I was stuck on nursery rhymes. Thursday, it was fairly tales. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Red Riding Hood, I followed the link to an entry on something I'd never heard of before: liminality. While Wikipedia has not nearly evolved into something rigorous enough to be considered a sole source for research, sometimes a new word or concept can shift something known and comfortable into an entirely different perspective; this is what that definition did for me.

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