Diabetes complication? Prove it!
by IDS Director of Patient Care and Education, Alicia Downs
Once we are diagnosed with diabetes of any kind it too often feels like that is the only thing about us that doctors acknowledge!
You’re in pain? If you controlled your blood sugar better… Sick? You know if you control your blood sugar better…. Stab wound? You really should work on your carb counting! WHAT?!! It is as if we cease to be people who happen to have diabetes and become walking testimonies to the entropy that diabetes can reek on the body.
But this is far from true.
Yes, we are more susceptible to certain diseases and injuries because we live with an underlying autoimmune disease and/or endocrine distinction. However, this has absolutely no bearing on the fact that we are still human beings with the same risks of every other ailment that plagues the rest of humanity! It is for this reason that I encourage patients to require their clinicians to prove that diabetes is the cause of their issue.
Even if it looks like a diabetes complication PROVE IT! You need to rule out every other potential cause of this issue before we just “blame the blood sugar”.
Why is this so important? Because we can be ignoring the true cause and spending a lot of valuable time energy and resources on the wrong treatments all because we made a huge assumption based on ONE trait!
Imagine if we assumed that a patient presenting with abdominal pain is having pain because they are in childbirth based only on their being female and of childbearing age. I do no advanced testing, I ignore the patient’s statements that they are not pregnant and could not be pregnant, in fact, I proceed to schedule the patient for a C-section! That would be insane! That would be negligent in the extreme! But this happens to people with diabetes all the time when we are told that our medical issues are caused by diabetes, without any actual proof of that beyond the fact that we have diabetes and are not perfect in our management.
Because of their diabetes, they were all diagnosed with “Diabetic Kidney Disease” (DKD) however 62.8% of those studied showed that they had kidney disease factors unrelated to Diabetes. This means that, while Diabetes may have been a contributing factor to their kidney failure, there were other factors that were possibly going untreated because no one bothered looking any further than Diabetes as the culprit.
This points to the importance of demanding that our doctors look beyond our diabetes for the cause of other health issues.
This is critically important if our other indicators point toward good glycemic wellness. In this study, those who tested for non-DKD causes of their Kidney Disease had lower A1C, did not have other vascular complications like retinopathy, and had high eGFR and lower protein to creat ratios. These are all indications that these patients were in good health from a diabetes standpoint, so assuming diabetes is the cause of their Kidney Disease is illogical.
If you are a person who is managing your diabetes well, make your doctors rule out other potential causes before calling it a diabetes complication. it could be the difference between finding a cure and racking up yet another lifelong chronic disease.
For more information: https://www.healio.com/news/nephrology/20240826/patients-with-diabetes-on-kidney-biopsy-may-have-nondiabetic-kidney-disease-findings
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