Yeah, that’s usually the cut-off for minimizing complications but a lot of us, especially on sites like this one, are trying for as close to normal as we can reasonably get. A lot of us old-timers recall getting scolded for 6.5 or below back in the pre-CGM days because A1C is an average and prevailing opinion was you only got that kind of number by having too many hypos. With CGMs that’s no longer the prevailing standard, but like a lot of things it lingers (“You’re too OLD to have T1!!!” is my personal favorite). Now that we have CGMs, TIR (Time In Range) is a more useful data point.
[long philosophical rant follows]
Speaking of acronyms, YDFLNCA is the one I coined for this phenomenon after 20 years of not being able to get a referral to an endo (university HMO, uggh): You’re Doing Fine Let’s Not Change Anything. Which is kind of understandable from their perspective. As a consequence of the stuff having been around for generations a lot of us don’t think about what a peculiar situation insulin therapy poses from the MD’s p.o.v. With virtually any other pharmaceutical they deal with, including OTC, there are strict guidelines as to how much you should take. May take some experimentation to get it right, but then it’s 30mm/day or whatever ad infinitum. But insulin is this powerful compound that can put you in a coma or kill you, yet they have to send you off into the wild to dose yourself with however much you need multiple times a day with no medical supervision. This goes very much against the grain, but there’s no other way to do it. From a hippocratic “Do no harm” perspective this is very uncomfortable, especially for a non-specialist. So they have always been more apprehensive and concerned about lows than highs. I think this actually accounts for the enthusiasm for pumping, especially now there’s AID/CGM integration. They’d really really really prefer it if this whole business could be computer algorithm controlled and taken out of the hands of these untrained, non-medico patients who are liable to screw it up if left to their own wayward impulses. I think that’s one reason the Medtronic AID philosophy leans much more toward a black-box, lock-down approach than Tandem’s, but that’s a whole 'nother rant…