Is All That Bleeding And Checking A Waste Of Money?

Most of us are know about diabetic testing involving stabbing a finger to draw blood, smearing that blood on a glucose test strip and inserting it into a machine. The diabetic meter then tells you what your blood sugar level is. Some people repeat this exercise up to eight or ten times per day.

What if all this does almost nothing to control your disease, makes you anxious and is a waste of money? Is all that bleeding and checking is a waste of time and money?

According to recent independent health information, it proposes that frequent checking of blood glucose by people who don't use insulin, is not a good idea. It leads to unneccesary anxiety as well as unnecessary spending of hundreds of millions of dollars annually on even the most affordable diabetic supplies.

Blood sugar testing is requirement for insulin-dependent diabetics. These are people who are born with diabetes or develop it as a child. However, more than 80 per cent of the people with diabetes are type-2 diabetics who generally develop it in adulthood and need to control their blood sugars by modifying their diet and exercising.

Some drugs might help to prevent the ramifications of diabetes but frequent testing of their blood sugar?



Diabetic Testing Supplies Industry

Over the past 10 years, the marketing of blood testing for type-2 diabetics has intensified, with more emphasis on getting mildly diabetic people to test and retest, causing them to obsess about their numbers.

No one wants to needlessly test their blood every day, yet fearmongering rhetoric continues to drive people to test their blood sugars frequently, with warnings that doing so will prevent kidney disease, or blindness -even though that is simply not true.

Originally inspired by an article on diabetes.org