Professional Ignorance about Type II Diabetes

There is an astonishingly bad article about how to treat type II diabetes in a publication called Diabetes Health titled Type II Diabetes: From Old Dogmas to New Realities. The author, a head-in-the-sand woman named Hope Warshaw, says that low carb diets don't help people with diabetes and that we should all follow the advice of the American Diabetes Association.

Or, as Tom Naughton of the Fathead Movie fame says, this article essentially says "Just give up and take your drugs, dangit!" Read Naughton's whole critique of this astoundingly stupid article. The ignorance of the professional medical community on type II diabetes just astounds me.

But the best part of this article are the 40+ comments, and almost all of them supports the low carb approach and offers many testimonials of the success rate of following low carb diets. Many express dismay at how utterly clueless the author is, given that she is an RD, a certified diabetes educator, and has a master's degree. Clearly, she is an example of what Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com calls "credentialed, not educated."

So why does the ADA promote a high carb diet, when high carb diets are the root problem for type II diabetics? I am not sure. But check out their corporate sponsor page: the ADA is sponsored by Coca Cola, Hershey's, Mars, Kellogs, General Mills, and Pepsi. Truly, a "Who's Who" of American high carb junk food.  Page referenced on July 6, 2011; corporate sponsors may change over time.

My type II diabetes has been reigned in since beginning the low carb journey. My HbA1c level is quite good, I am off insulin, I have lost a lot of weight, and my blood pressure is normal. All without following the advice of the ADA.

CWOPO

Conventional Wisdom or Prevailing Opinion (CWOPO) has really let me down in recent months.  I have learned that salt restriction may actually be dangerous, contrary to what we have always been told.  The idea that cholesterol causes heart disease has been debunked for years now, but the USDA still issues food guidelines that assume it is true.

Soy is supposed to be the new health super food (and it's in everything we eat that is processed--just read the labels).  Yet I am discovering that soy is a very dangerous food, and that giving soy formula to infants is like giving them birth control pills.

We are told to do cardiovascular exercise, and then learn that it may actually cause heart disease.

My daughter has educated me about natural child birth and the benefits of using a nurse midwife (see the movie, The Business of Being Born on Netflix or Amazon Prime).  Naturally, this movie upset the AMA.

We are told to have regular physical exams, then we are told that annual physicals don't do much for us.

The American Diabetes Association approved diet is heavy on carbs, yet these same carbs are causing blood sugar spikes.  Don't these so-called professionals know this?  Dr. Bernstein takes the ADA to task for its 2008 guidelines that are problematic for diabetics.

Last year, I had a scare with rheumatoid arthritis (fortunately for me, it was merely reactive arthritis), and all the conventional treatments are pretty scary, not to mention expensive.  Yet there is a simple, safe, inexpensive, medically proven alternative to the other expensive and dangerous rheumatoid arthritis treatments.  And this treatment is shunned by rheumatologists and the medical establishment.

I am now starting to question a lot of what I have been told to do by medical authorities.  CWOPO is often seriously flawed and out of date, in my opinion.  I have discovered that evidence based medicine is not usually practiced, though it should be.  CWOPO is what is practiced, and it is very hard to change, despite empirical evidence to the contrary.

I am learning that if it is my health problem, I must take ownership of the problem and do the research about what to do.  This is what I have done with the type II diabetes, what I did when I thought I had rheumatoid arthritis, and what I have done with my weight loss strategy.  I will not merely passively accept what an M.D. tells me in the future.