How to Cope Successfully with Diabetes

Description

• If there was ever a role model for people with diabetes, insulin-dependent or otherwise, Sir Stephen Redgrave is it. Few people with diabetes aspire to his Olympic gold medal heights but everyone can take heart from the way he put his body through the most rigorous training and still kept good control of his diabetes
• The main aim of this book is to achieve a good quality of life despite the health hiccup of diabetes. This book describes all aspects of the healthy lifestyle that every person with diabetes needs to follow, it is positive and optimistic to give people with diabetes a sense that they can shape their own future

Book contains

Part 1

• Diabetes explained
• Understanding Diabetes
• People with Diabetes — Some case histories

Part 11

• Living with Type 1 Diabetes
• A Model for Managing Type 1 Diabetes
• Understanding hyperglycaemia, ketoacidosis and hypoglycaemia Eating Right
• Organizing your insulin
• Tests and targets

Part 111

• Living with Type 2 Diabetes
• A global problem
• Type 2 Diabetes and the metabolic syndrome
• Being in control
• Keeping glucose levels down

Part 1V

• Complications
• Why you mustn't smoke — And how to stop if you do
• Keeping complications at bay
• 'Microvascular' complications
• 'Macrovascular' complications
• Less common problems
• Diabetes in pregnancy

• The greatest Olympian of all time and all countries is Britain's oarsman Sir Steven Redgrave. Anyone who watched the Sydney Olympics - knows that he is the first athlete in endurance events ever to win gold medals in five successive Olympics. He also has diabetes
• If there was ever a role model for people with diabetes, insulin-! dependent or otherwise, Sir Steven Redgrave is it. Of course, few people with diabetes can aspire to his athletic heights. But every one of them can take heart from the way he has put his body through the - most rigorous training of all, yet still kept good control over his diabetes and remained super-fit
• Rowing is a punishing and gruelling sport. It is a huge feat to keep at the top for more than 16 years, even without diabetes. With it, the task was surely insurmountable. Until now
• That's because we know so much more than we used to about how to control diabetes, and how to keep people with it free from harm, both in the short and long term. Sir Steven has obviously controlled his diabetes to perfection. The main aim of this book is to help others to emulate him — not in a search for Olympic gold, but at least in achieving the quality of life he so obviously enjoys, despite his health 'hiccup'
• This health 'hiccup' is what most people with diabetes have. Kept under good control, it cannot be looked upon truly as an illness. Today's treatments and management schemes for diabetes have turned it from a fatal disease into an inconvenience that, with sensible control can be lived with into a normal old age
• This book does not aim to guide potential Sir Steven Redgrave's to Olympic medals. But it could do so. Because the rules for diabetes affect everyone who has it, whether it started in childhood or in middle age, whether insulin is needed or not, and whether they are athletes or just average everyday people. What this book does aim to do is to set out the rules. It describes the problems and pitfalls for people with diabetes and their families and carers, and how these issues can be faced and avoided.
• Told for the first time they have diabetes, many people feel that they face a life-sentence of poor health and early death. It can be a very - unhappy time for children and their parents, and for the adults who, perhaps, until the diagnosis were sailing on through life, unaware of the time-bomb of troubles waiting to blow up in their faces.
• Given the example of people like Sir Steven, people told they have diabetes can take a deep breath, put aside their fears, and look forward to a good and long life, just as enjoyable as everyone else's
• This does not mean that people with diabetes can live just like anyone without it. They obviously can't. They must stick closely to the correct healthy eating habits, they must take the correct amount of exercise, and they must comply with their medical team's advice on treatment, be it on insulin or glucose-lowering pills, or high blood pressure lowering drugs. It is a bit harder to be a child, teenager or adult with diabetes than one without it, but facing the challenge is worth the effort
• In fact, there is no alternative. Failing to face up to the challenge can lead to severe health problems. Teenagers who rebel against their fairly strict routine (unhappily a very common occurrence) are courting early blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes and circulation problems in their limbs. Adults with later-onset diabetes can expect the same problems a few decades later if they don't manage to control their weight, their smoking habits and their blood pressure
• The good news is that good control of diabetes and blood pressure in both children and adults, along with a healthy lifestyle, can greatly extend their length and quality of life, usually well into old age
• So this book describes all aspects of the healthy lifestyle that every person with diabetes needs to follow. It is positive and optimistic: it is more about 'dos' than' don'ts'. It is full of hope for the future: one chapter deals with the possibility of cure using modern transplant technology. The main purpose of this book, however, is to give people with diabetes a sense that they can shape their own future

About the author

• Dr Tom Smith Having graduated from Birmingham Medical School Dr Tom Smith spent two years in hospital house positions before entering general practice, first in Birmingham and then South Ayrshire. He then became medical adviser and later medical director of a major pharmaceutical company where he organised and helped to publish clinical trials of new drugs and took the Diploma in Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
• Dr Smith has been a full time writer since 1977 with many popular medical books to his credit together with weekly medical columns in several regional newspapers
• He also finds time to practice as a locum for the family doctors in his home area of South West Scotland
• Tom has diabetes and is married with two children