News
Editorial: Not a cure it's a treatment
Scott Wagar
11/12/2013
“Insulin is not a cure for diabetes; it is a treatment.” These are the words of Dr. Frederick Banting during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize for Medicine Award in 1923 for the discovery of insulin.
November is National Diabetes Month, a month dedicated to bringing awareness about diabetes and finding a cure for this devastating disease.
Most individuals think that insulin is a cure for diabetes, but like all diseases that are treated by medication, the most important thing individuals can know is that researches have not found a cure for diabetes.
Diabetes is controlled by medication. This statement might be hard to understand because when individuals see diabetics out and about they see, for the most part, an individual who looks rather healthy. Unfortunately, that is not true.
According to the American Diabetes Association, diabetes can lead to long-term complications in heart attacks, strokes, nerve damage, blood vessel disease that may require an amputation and impotence in men. When it comes to kidney failure and blindness, diabetes is the leading causes of these diseases.
The pharmaceutical company, Novo Nordisk, states that in 2012 an estimated 371 million people (8.3 percent of the world’s adult population) have diabetes. This number is expected to rise to 552 million by 2030. When it comes to diabetic mortality, 4.8 million people died in the world in 2012 due to diabetes, incredibly, half of all these people were under the age of 60.
Diabetes and medication treatments is a complicated course when it comes to controlling diabetes. When caring for the disease, it is impossible to control one’s diabetes in the same manner the body does for a non-diabetic. One can keep tight control of the disease, but even under those circumstances it is never near perfect. Diabetes is literally a guessing game filled with high and low blood sugars that are constantly raising havoc in a diabetic body.
Diabetes also causes complications over everyday issues like stress, tiredness, illness, eating habits and medication agility whether it’s an insulin injection or oral medication.
It’s a disease that researchers call the “silent killer” because although diabetics look well outwardly, on the inside they deal with deterioration of their organs and blood vessels, psychological worries, physical pain and a feeling down right sick a lot of times. (It is also called the “silent killer because at this moment worldwide only 50 percent of all people with diabetes know they have disease. Diabetes has a way of damaging your body without people knowing it at first.)
Diabetes is far from being cured and it needs the world’s assistance in finding a cure through awareness, research and financial donations to end this terrible disease, which is really an invisible killer in our world. Please help today in stopping this disease.