You’re probably asking about MDI or multiple daily injections. This is often contrasted to people using an insulin pump. Insulin is delivered with a “package insert” that will show a graph for an average of a group of test subjects. The key specifications for insulin action are onset, peak, and duration.
Realize that this will vary from person to person and also within the same person from meal to meal and day to day. The rapid acting insulin analogs like Apidra, Novolog, and Humalog will (working from memory here) have onset of 15-20 minutes, a peak at about 60 minutes and a duration of 4-6 hours. You need to remember, however, your diabetes will vary from these charts, but it’s a good reference to learn.
The “tail” is the last hour or so of glucose lowering action. Some insulins pack more punch than others at the end of their curve. This is also a your diabetes may vary item. A strong tail can be a good or bad thng considering the nature and quantity of the food it’s intended to metabolize.
So, to answer your question directly, if you inject 2 units of Novolog at 6 p.m., it could be acting as late as 11 p.m. Everything else held equal, smaller doses, like 2 units will not endure as long as say an 8 or 10 unit injection.
i learn more every day, so much yet to know. thank you for sharing your knowledge!! very grateful to everyone on the forum for sharing. must have been so hard in the old days, before internet!!
That video of Berstein you have posted he talks about some of his ‘patients’ using IV shots and that it takes about an hour all up, did you even watch that video? Because the half life is actually reduced to almost zero it is actually quite difficult to become hypoglycemic for the simple fact that it wears off quite quickly. Here is a video of Bernstein talking of IV shots in his patients saying it takes an hour to bring it down IV and it’s an exellent way to bring high sugars down. It is no more dangerous than IM or SC, it’s a myth that it’s more dangerous
I just want you to know that I started following Dr. B’s WOE 12 years ago. I remain very active on his forum and listen to all his teleconferences and videos. Yes, I have seen this video. Dr. B talks about patients doing IV insulin, but he says that he is so scared of doing it, he could not do it himself. He even called himself a coward. Dr. B does advocate an IM shot, you can see hit video on the IM shot below. I routinely will use an IM shot for a quick correction from a really high blood sugar. But an IV injections scares the “bejesus” out of me.
Do you think he was recommending it like he recommends IM injections? Listening to it I came away with the sense that he feared it ,like he thought it might kill him.
No, I didn’t see him encouraging people to use it like IM injections. Rather, he seemed to be saying it’s an option for people with extreme situations like his patients with gastroparesis. But I also didn’t interpret his fear as being about anything other than sticking a needle in his own vein.
Bernstein also advocates IV shots (watch the video above that I posted of the good Dr). Bernstein is scared to inject himself not because he’s concerned about dying or ‘men in white coats’ he’s quite supportive of it and says in the video I posted that he wished he had learned to do it when he was younger, but he is frighened of sticking the needle into his vein and he would find the one hand tournequet difficult and that he helped his patients use a one handed velcro style tourniquet, which I admit sounds difficult but none the less a little faster if executed correctly.
