thanks Zoe :) we can't change our situation, all we can do is to adjust to it. Let's keep our faith. We are lucky we have diabetes, we are all special and we are more tougher in a way that we can live our lives in spite of our condition and temptations we encounter everyday. I'm glad I found a family here too :)
I was diagnosed in 1989 at 10-months-old. I remember being 7-years-old and my doctors telling me by the time I'm a teenager there will be a cure. I'm 23 now. BS.
I think that back then beanpole the drs thought that they would find a "cure" but as time went on they decided that it wasn't nessary in the cards.
I got that prediction too. It didn't fall too well with me seeing that I was 10 at diagnoses and my only thought was "I will die b/f my 31st b-day.
Seems like my docs were not optomistic. I was told that I would have to use insulin for the rest of my life
See, same thing for me pretty much. When I was first diagnosed, and the subsequent months, no one said anything about a cure...it seemed like a fact that we would have type 1 for life. Than you come on the DOC and you find out there is hope at least...something to fight for. Being/feeling on your own with a chronic disease is not a good thing...a wider community is needed.
it seems impossible unless a cure is through prevention. it's an autoimmune disease and part of our bodies are destroyed. i know a few folks that have under gone islet transplantation and i hardley consider that a cure. in the same sense that a heart transplant is not a cure for heart disease. it may some day increase the quality of our lives but a cure?
That is how the world sadly works, you need to keep things calm so that you can control people and society. Imagine they would have told you the truth, yeah we really dont care about a cure, that would not generate any cash flow.
To contain a pissed-of society who need to tell them a purpose and a why, so this is why they usually tell is genetic from you parents or grandparents or a bad gene you have, now imagine that they told you: it bad food you are eating all those chemicals in meds, food and pollution. You would go out there and protests and create a big damage to those flow cash industries and politics too.
I wasn't told anything about a cure, but then no one was taking my emotions or view of the future seriously anyway. It was just "here, take this pill and follow this meal plan" and that was it. Well, the pill didn't work, and the meal plan was unbearable anyway, so I kind of stopped paying attention. I was focused on getting the doc to put me on insulin, which worked like a charm as soon as I got the proper regimen, and then getting him to prescribe me a pump, which he was very resistant to at first. So I wasn't really focused on a cure, because I was more focused on staying alive. And I am still not really optimistic about a cure any time soon, because to me a cure means having a normally functioning pancreas just like everyone else. An artificial pancreas doesn't fit the definition of cure for me, and by the time they really come up with a commercially viable one, they'll probably tell me I'm too old anyway!
In 1989 I recieved there will be the “there will be a cure in 5 years” mantra when I was diagnosed. I find it interesting that the doctors involved in diagnosis are the ones often saying “5 years”, but endos or the ones treating us for the long haul are not othen making these comments.
I am guessing here. It must have been in the mid? - late? 1970s or early 1980s that JDRF held a meeting, and we all attended, in Chicago, presenting a researcher who was going to be transplanting islet cells within 5 years.
So it wasn't a primary care provider who said this. It was a physician-researcher at a meeting. I didn't take hope from him. I took away from the meeting that the researcher didn't seem to be expecting problems that could be forthcoming, and I wondered how that could be, since unforeseen problems always came my way when I was conducting research. They are always around a corner in research.
My doctor looked at it as chronic-for-a-lifetime and expressed to my husband, as brother physician, that my life expectancy was going to be short, that it had been in my system for probably 10-15 years already, and that complications were already started! Of course, when 2 physicians are together, they don't necessarily speak to the patient.
I was never told about a cure but I was told over and over again about kidney failure, going blind, and body parts removed. At nine years young that is not what a child should hear. My attitude was FU. I hate most endo's. I think most of them are a bunch of scum-bags. Moving forward I believe a better treatment is within reach, The problem might more more politics and financial though. If I have to keep living with this and like this I will probably not live much longer anyway. In the last year I've nearly died two dozen times from severe low sugar in my sleep. Once my folks pass away its basically the end for me. In all honestly I can't say I am not afraid to die but this to me is nothing but suffering and I think once I'm gone I will be in a much better place. Though diabetes comepletely ruined my life in the end I will be relieved of it one way or another. Death really can't come fast enough.
I remember talking with my former and now retired PCP, who believed that a cure was just around the corner. that must have been fifteen or twenty years ago. Personally, I don't think I will see it in my lifetime.
The thing that gets me is most diabetics think a cure is never gonna happen yet the JDRF and other organizations are still in business and getting enormous donations. If people think its a fraud then why the hell keep donating money? It's not just diabetes, its all diseases. It's really is a sick world we live in to think that a human being would prefer mankind to suffer greatly because of greed/profit. Still no one can actually prove that is why we don't have a cure but from the outside looking in it sure does seem that way. The only people that are in the know so to speak if something better may be on the horizon are the research groups doing the studies. Of course until human studies take place its all just speculation of what may or may not work. My only faith at this point is Viacyte. Maybe with just a little bit of luck their formulation will do the trick
I have no doubt that cures for chronic, non-contagious diseases are coming, but not in my lifetime. And I don't criticise organizations soliciting money to fund the scientific work necessary to find these cures.
It's just that I resent ignorant people who don't understand just how DIFFICULT it is. The old saw "If we could send a man to the moon, why can't we cure diabetes ( or cancer or whatever)" is just SO stupid. Curing these diseases is a million-fold more difficult than the simple engineering problems of sending a man to the moon. We don't even know enough about the basic science, let alone the pathways, genetics and abnormalities that cause these diseases. And I don't believe anyone is sitting on the cures, either -- maybe the iron lung industry didn't like the idea of curing polio, but there were dedicated scientists who turned their attention to preventing it, and also to easing the lives of people who had already contracted it. So I don't doubt that the cure will come, but I do understand that the breakthrough will come when the scientific knowledge has come together to make it possible.
i must agree with your notion that scientist aren't sitting on cures for diseases in order to gain profit.
I.E.: on the topic of polio, Dr. John Salk did not profit from the polio vaccine.
Our endo said 10 years for cure, stem cells.... 5 years for AP...
Here are four AP trials I searched today, all for adults...
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=artificial+Pancreas+Outpatient+
nice... the marathon, not the way off prediction in 68...
Even if a cure is on it's way, we will not know in advance when it will come out.
One thing is for sure, research and development is doing great progress and scientists have the most advanced tools ever.
If cures were discovered in the past with little tools or technology, i can only imagine of what's coming in the next 10 to 20 years.
Be optimist and have faith and keep taking your insulin until then.
i was diagnosed at 17. 37 year ago. My doctor a pragmatist said my my child could expect a cure and I could expect better treatment. So far he was pretty right. I do sense a cure, not those that vae t rather for those who might get it and better treatment.
now, He also said the cubs would win a world series some day. So far, he record is a little spotty. LOL
Rick Phillips