I wrote an editorial on Diabetes News Hound today about the growing number of car crashes being blamed on diabetes rather than the poor decisions made by the person operating the vehicle, who also happens to have diabetes. I think this is an important topic because driving in the United States is considered a privilege and not a right. Other countries, such as the U.K., place restrictions of drivers that rely on insulin. You can check out the full editorial here: Are You Guilty of Driving While Diabetic?
It also got me to wondering what precautions, if any, you take to lower your risk of having a hypo or hyper glyciemic episode while driving or if this is even a concern?
I think that as a country we need to see each driver as an individual person. Placing people in “groups” based upon medical issues such as epilepsy, diabetes, or visual impairments etc… is not the way to go. Each epileptic is different, each diabetic is different, and each visual impairment is different. We should only place restrictions on individual licenses instead of saying ALL diabetics…we should say THIS particular individual who has diabetes.
Even then what is to say that a perfectly healthy non-diabetic person wouldn’t have a low blood sugar that caused some sort of issue? Who says only diabetics have hypoglycemia?
the exact same thing that happens in the uk happens here in aus aswell. we have different stages that we go through to get our liscenses and you require a medical to be performed each time. I had to get three medicals done within a one year gap and now one annualy just because I am “diabetic”. bit extreme when I’m only 17 and in perfect health isn’t it? the problem with being catagorised like this is it doesn’t take into account each person, instead grouping all diabetics in the one group, not taking into consideration differences in control, awareness of low BG, etc.
to put it simply it’s absolute crap and unfare.
