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Over the past month, it seems like I've had a lot of "intuitive" feedback. No, I'm not talking about my own psychic revelations. I'm talking about diabetics citing intuition and their body's signals as their diabetes beacon. It seems readers across the web are using their body's feedback as their guiding light to treat blood sugars. And I have to say...I'm not all that pleased.

I can definitely understand where they are coming from in these statements, but I also have to say that I don't think it's a wise choice. At least not for me. For me, it could be a life or death situation.

No, meters and CGMS aren't all that accurate from time to time. On occasion, I get a really crazy number that I just have to double check. And the same drop of blood can read two different numbers across a thirty point span. But that doesn't mean that my body knows best.

If I used my body as a compass for my diabetes management, I'd be treating highs with juice and lows with insulin. And I have to say that it would happen on many days...and end up with me in the emergency room. My body can't be a guiding light. My body doesn't show many signs, or one set of signs, for every blood sugar.

I have often felt very faint, on the verge of passing out. I've sat down to rest my head on the cool tile of the bathroom floor and waited for the world to stop spinning. Sounds like a low blood sugar, right? Wrong...I've been 140, 260, and many places in between. I've also felt the desperate need of a drink...the cotton mouth and fuzzy cloud looming over my head. And checked to find that my blood sugar was 81 instead of the dreadful high that I was ready to treat with units of insulin.

There's no way that I could successfully manage my blood sugar without using a meter (that isn't to say that I haven't treated without testing before, because I have). I need that technological device to give me some idea of where my blood sugar might be. I need the number on the screen to tell me that I'm having a low even before I'm having symptoms. Without it, I'd be dead.

I'm not saying that you can manage your diabetes solely using a meter. And I'm not saying that you can't manage it without one. But I'm positive that every diabetic would be better off using one just in case, even if it isn't the deciding factor on an insulin shot or a quick carb fix. To me, it isn't sound advice to say that meters are so unreliable that we shouldn't use them all that often anyway. Meters have taken great strides in the last few years to be fairly accurate in light of certain situations.

I'm also curious how a person could possibly dose their insulin correctly without knowing what their blood sugars are. For me, I use a 50 mg/dl scale for my correction factor. So if I'm 150, I take 1 unit of Humalog. But if I'm 275, I take 3.5 units of Humalog. There's a big difference between those two injections. And there's a huge difference in my life if I switch those around. One unit on a 275 blood sugar won't leave me feeling that great. And 3.5 units on a 150 will leave me in desperate need of glucagon.

Plus, if you never check your blood sugar, you can't possibly see the trends in your life or what foods or factors might be causing an increase or decrease in your blood sugars. That means that you'd never be able to accurately understand if you needed to change your insulin routine. You'd just be guessing, which means your control might not be at its optimum level.

Maybe there are people out there that manage just fine without testing their blood sugars. But I'm going to stick up for the rest of the diabetics and say that we should use our meters. We shouldn't rely independently on what the meter says, but we should take everything into account before making management decisions. We need to listen to the intuition inside our bodies that says that our best control is utilizing the resources set before us, and not putting our life in our hands by guessing on what our body may or may not be telling us.