There have been a couple of recent threads on LinkedIn regarding the definition of a "cure" for diabetes.

As everyone here who takes insulin will agree, diabetes cannot be "cured" by diet alone. And as everyone whose diabetes is currently controlled in part, or entirely, by diet and exercise will agree, just like "insulin is not a cure", "eating the right foods" is not a cure, either.

Merriam-Webster defines "cure (noun)" in our sense as the following:

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I've been somewhat ambivalent about today's rally surrounding the United Nations Summit on Non-Communicable Diseases. The libertarian "party line" is that the United Nations does little more than abrogate nation-states' sovereignty and forcibly redistribute income from the wealthier nations to the less-wealthy, dampening incentives for innovation and destroying private charity efforts which would otherwise improve the lives of those in need. On the other hand, the prospect of spending time with friends I seldom see in-person is an opportunity not to be missed.

It's a dilemma I'd been wrestling with for a couple of months, and friendship was winning over politics. However, neither friendship nor politics had the choice to decide.

The deciding factor was money.

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One day. I'll learn to start listening to that voice, the one that occasionally gives me advice, the voice that I largely ignore. It's a tiny little internal voice, coming (I presume) from a tiny little internal smart guy. In my imagination, he dresses much better than I do.

Let's call him... Tiny Rob.

Now, to be fair, Tiny Rob has a pretty spotty record. Sure, he may have been the one who sent me to the doctor five years ago, but he's taken more on-the-job vacations since then than George W. Bush. Tiny Rob has left me to my own devices for months at a stretch, only popping by occasionally to ask, "So, what'd I miss?"

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From time to time, a heated discussion will erupt around the terms and phrases "prediabetes", "borderline diabetes", and "beating diabetes". The basic gist of the debate goes like this:

Someone will post that he was told he has "borderline diabetes" or "prediabetes", or that he had type 2 diabetes, but since he changed his diet, got off his diabetes medications, and has normal lab results, he has reversed or cured his diabetes.

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Several prominent dBloggers have posted this week about issues related to Driving While Low (DWL) and premature death. The subjects of these posts were people with Type 1 diabetes, which is the group with which we normally associate rapid-onset dissociative hypoglycemia. While this sort of hypoglycemia is certainly most common in Type 1 diabetes, it is occasionally seen in insulin-dependent Type 2. Most of the time, these lows would seem to be related to insulin activity peaking early or late -- or at least not in synch with one's food and drink.

Unfortunately, insulin is not always the culprit.

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It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that just because I don't have to take a pill to control my Type 2 diabetes, I'm "cured". After all, that's what so many people in my condition were told, so many times, over the past half-century. Some are still told that today. And given that most of the time, my blood glucose levels stay between 85 and 120, with the occasional high postprandial excursion (which occasionally -- like, when I'm low and having dinner at a restaurant -- will lead to a high fasting reading the next morning), there's nothing to alarm the unsuspecting practitioner that back in 2002, at fifty pounds heavier than I am today, the doctor's meter read 170 mg/dl after a ten-hour fast, with an HbA1c of 7.8. Or in lay terms, "I had diabeetus".

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