Understanding The Devastating Real Costs Of Diabetes

Research from the American Diabetes Association shows the total costs associated with those diagnosed with diabetes was $327 billion includes $237 billion in direct medical costs and $90 billion in reduced productivity. $1 out of every $7 spent on health care is related to diabetes and it’s complications.

Diabetics have an average medical expenditure of $16,752 per year. About $9,601 is directly attributed to diabetes. On average, diabetics have medical expenditures about 2.3 X higher than non-diabetics.

The report also talks about the indirect financial costs of diabetes…

• missing work ($3.3 billion),
• being less productive at work ($26.9 billion),
• reduced productivity for people not working ($2.3 billion),
• inability to work from diabetes related disability ($37.5 billion), and
• lost productivity due to early death ($19.9 billion).

The report can be found here.

Diabetes doesn’t just cost money though… It gets worse.

It costs you your limbs, kidneys, heart, eyes, brain, and your life.

If you get injured, you won’t heal when when you are a diabetic. This increases your risk of ongoing, lifelong chronic pain. This is highly relevant in my practice where I see so many acute injuries from car accidents, falls, overuse injuries, as well as, so many chronic pain cases.

If you are “pre” diabetic, hypoglycemic, or an outright diabetic then you’re house is on fire.

It’s an emergency telling you that you need to change before very bad things happen. Medication may very well be necessary for you right now. It’s not enough though.

Failing to address what is causing the problem will have an exceptionally high probability of very, very bad outcomes.

This may ultimately lead to loss of limbs, possibly blindness, a heart attack, cancer, or a neuro-degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s dementia.

Before the damage gets this far advanced you will develop fatigue, pain, numbness, sight problems (including cataracts and poor vision – google insulin resistance and vision problems), memory problems, and just about any other health problem you can imagine.

Diabetes (or pre-diabetes ) is effecting how every single cell in your body can get energy.

This type of diabetes (type 2) is from chronically elevated insulin levels.

Often high insulin precedes blood sugar elevations by many years. During this time, damage to cells and inflammation is occurring in every part of your body even if you’re still able to keep up with your ever increasing insulin demands so far.

Our bodies are good at hiding problems from us until you already have a very serious problem. Don’t wait, by the time you get symptoms it’s already very far advanced.

How do you know if you have an insulin problem?

One way is to measure fasting insulin levels. Your doctor generally won’t do this test because it’s usually not be covered by insurance. Insurance waits for a crisis to pay for care. Fasting insulin levels tells you more about the coming crisis. It’s a leading indicator.

What else tells you you have an insulin problem?

Difficulty losing weight, gaining belly fat, fatigue when you don’t eat and fatigue after meals.

These can be other problems… but they are often red flags that you are in serious trouble already very often with chronically high insulin.

One of the big misconceptions about diabetes that is often re-enforced by medical care is that you just basically eat what you want and cover it with drugs including insulin to bring the blood sugar down.

This is why so many diabetics suffer for years before dying on average 12 years earlier often from diabetic related heart disease or diabetic related cancer.

How do you reduce blood sugar so that your insulin stays low and you don’t develop diabetes?

1. You really must get rid of sugar, processed foods (think grains), and vegetable oil in your diet. This is the primary cause of elevated blood sugars leading to elevated insulin that knocks it back down but also drives massive amounts of inflammation in your body.
2. Improve sleep and reduce stress because cortisol drives high blood sugar followed by high insulin.
3. Exercise daily and include resistance training.
4. Other things can help ranging from fasting to other changes you can make to reduce insulin levels before it’s very late in the disease process. This should only be done if being carefully monitored as a diabetic.
5. It should be noted that certain medications may raise blood sugar and/or lead to diabetes including steroids, mental health meds… clozapine, olanzapine, risperidone, quetiapine, birth control pills, high blood pressure medications like beta-blockers and thiazide diuretics, statin drugs to lower cholesterol, and more.

This can not be stressed highly enough, only taking medication to artificially lower blood sugar while continuing to do all the things driving your chronically high blood sugar and insulin without addressing the cause of the problem will lead to extremely bad health problems including years of suffering before an early death for the vast majority of people.

This is a very, very serious issue and has to be handled with that in mind… meaning doing whatever it takes to improve what is causing the problem (the overwhelming majority is lifestyle, NOT genetics) regardless of medications.