With the diagnosis of my husband with Type II Diabetes at the age of 34, it was our first exposure to “standard of care” in medicine. Already, he did not meet the “typical” patient as he was a marathon runner weighing in around 155 pounds with a height of 5’10”. But nevermind that, the doctor prescribed Metformin and tells us we must attend 2 classes of diabetes courses to help with nutrition.
Well, Metformin made my husband (Steve) feel terrible from Day 1. It was the worst he had felt in a very long time. Then on top of that, the classes tell us it is perfectly fine to eat bagels and drink orange juice. We realize very quickly this only causes horrendous spikes in insulin! It was the worst advice we had received (along with eating 5 to 6 small meals a day) and when we challenged the advice were we met with resistance. Our voice wasn’t heard, and we stopped listening as well. The search began for another way, hopefully a better way…one that would try to get to the actual root cause.
This lead to two books that were groundbreaking for us at that time:
- Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars (Originally published in 1997)
- The Schwarzbein Principle: The Truth about Losing Weight, Being Healthy and Feeling Younger (Originally published in 1999)
It has been a while since I read these books but they helped open our eyes to approaching our well-being with much more care than accepting everything as truth from the medical establishment. More importantly though, these books gave us confidence. Confidence to make decisions that may be counter to the medical establishment despite wishing it could be a partnership. There is a great article on modern medicine just published in The Guardian that talks about the need for medicine to make patient preferences a priority.
Thankfully, there is a lot of information available now but not everything will work for your lifestyle or will resonate with you. At the end, you will have to decide for yourself what makes sense moving forward.
