A Conspiracy Theory Preventing A Cure?

Type 1 and LADA
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Is There A Conspiracy Preventing A Diabetes Cure?

A very good blog about this issue was written on Diabetes Mine in 2012. This question is still being asked at the current time, so I think the content of the blog is certainly relevant.

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Well, on the one hand there’s the emotional situation of having heard “a cure is just 5 years away!” since I was dx’d 30+ years ago. I’m hardly unique in that (you’ve had it for what, 60+ years Richard?) and it does make you wonder how the ever-promised cure keeps receding ahead of us in time so consistently over the decades. But I’ve always thought it wasn’t so much a conspiracy as simply an economic fact of life. The payoff for improving management technology is much more immediate and reliable, so that’s where the effort goes.

What infuriates me much more–and does look like a “conspiracy,” in the sense of being deliberate and motivated not by any structural factors but purely by greed, is the continual jacking up of the costs of the stuff we do have. Shouldn’t insulins that have been around for decades now–lantus, novolog, humalog–be coming down in price rather than the opposite? Why is it that innovation in digital technology results in lowered costs over time, whereas innovation in pharmaceuticals seems to go the other way?

[on edit: Mein gott in Himmel what a lot of “You can reverse diabetes!” scammers and crackpots they have on the comment thread for that article!]

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I have strong mixed feelings about this.

I was diagnosed at age 35 about 5 years ago & immediately enrolled in a drug study for new dx’s. I spent 8 days in another city getting a daily infusion of one of those designer immunosuppressants. Kept a headache the whole time, had BG crashes of over 50 points multiple days (in 30 mins), made huge reductions in my insulin dosing, & on my last mixed meal test, recovered from a high of 250 with no insulin in less than 2 hours. The consensus was I had to have gotten the drug (had a 2 in 3 chance). The study ended early because of ‘lack of proof’ & it was official, I did not.

It’s always bothered me & I would have loved to have seen my results from all those mixed meal tests.

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