He's Cured? Family Doctors' Diabetes Treatment Gets Even Worse

He's Cured? Family Doctors' Diabetes Treatment Gets Even Worse

A medically naive friend called me up all excited yesterday. He'd just been to his family doctor--the one who diagnosed him with diabetes last year based on his fasting plasma glucose, and guess what. The doc told him he wasn't diabetic anymore!

Unfortunately for my friend, this was not because my friend had improved his blood sugar. Far from it. His fasting blood sugar had gone as high as 138 mg/dl (7.7 mmol/L) over the past few months. 

The reason the doctor told him he wasn't diabetic was that his A1c was 6.4%. The doctor exlained that "the definition of diabetes has changed" and by the new definition, you need an A1c of 6.5% to have diabetes. 

This is completely not true. The "definition" of diabetes is stated in a document created by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) an industry-funded charity that made itself the self-appointed authority on medical treatment of diabetes, despite the fact that it is controlled entirely by those who profit from treating diabetes, NOT by people who have it. The document is:

The Expert Committee on the Diagnosis and Classification of Diabetes Mellitus: Report of the expert committee on the diagnosis and classification of diabetes mellitus. Diabetes Care 20: 1183–1197, 1997