I have been hearing from a lot of people who share my frustration about the huge knowledge gap between those of us who are part of the online diabetes community and those who are out there alone in the real world.
Those of us online have been trading around information about the impact of carbs on our blood sugars but most people with diabetes who are not online are still eating low fat diets and watching their blood sugars soar. Many, especially those with Type 2 go into denial because the tools the doctors give them don’t work.
I was just talking about this today with one of my doctors who complained that most of the patients with diabetes who come to her for surgery never test their blood sugars. I explained to her that the primary care doctors in our region are still teaching people with Type 2–including those using basal insulin–to test once a week while fasting and to eat a high carb/low fat diet. My doctor friend was shocked when she learned that as she said “everyone knows low fat diets raise blood sugars!”
But everyone doesn’t know it, not where I live anyway.
So I put together some flyers for her to give her patients and posted the link to where you can download the flyer on my blog. I you want to do a bit of guerilla diabetes education, post some of these flyers in places where people with diabetes might see them.
Leave some with the magazines in the doctor’s waiting room. Post some on community bulletin boards. Give them to relatives or friends with poorly controlled diabetes. This is a distillation of the alt.support.diabetes “newly diagnosed” page that has been so helpful for many.