It has not taken me long to determine that I do not like the ADA. The first clue: sitting through hours of nutrition lectures which suggested a high-carb diet, because after all that’s what the ADA says to do. I am from a small town with massive cattle production nearby. I can in fact smell bull droppings. Especially when they involve the roller coaster that was my blood glucose level before dropping carbs to under a hundred grams a day…
Now that I have finally met my insurance deductible for the year, now that I just want to relax for a month and a half and enjoy not having to pay any more out of pocket than my premiums are already eating, now that I begin to fight tooth and claw with my insurance company just to get the damn test strips I have been prescribed, I do not have a lot of patience left for the sheer amount of cow dung.
Then Richard Kahn opens his mouth, and then a few days later I read about it, and I am grumpy.
I do not donate to the ADA. Heck, I don’t donate to anything right now, I am barely managing to pay my own bills. But I do belong to a charitable organization that donates a not-insubstantial sum of money towards the ADA every year, and I really want to have a viable alternative that I could (theoretically) point my lovely fellows towards as an alternative for charitable contributions towards diabetes research.
We need a diabetes organization that will advocate for us, for people who live and breathe and struggle and fly with diabetes, not for big business or whatever it is that the ADA represents. They certainly do not represent me.
Amen, Theodora. I think we should start an advocacy group consisting of diabetics. You can’t advocate for the disease unless you have it.
I’m not quite that hardcore - certainly people who live with PWDs (parents, partners, children) have an increased awareness of diabetic issues - but as it stands, the ADA has no clue when it comes to actual diabetic life and consequences.
One of the reasons I love TuDiabetes is that we’re keepin’ it real here.