HealthyConcerns.com

Diabetes: a worldwide problem...and one where people tend to "blame the victim"

I was at Bloggercon this weekend, and durng lunch on Saturday we had a meetup of medically-focused bloggers. It was a small bunch, including both active medbloggers and those who are working in the health care space and are curious about medblogging. It was organized by BlogFriend Enoch Choi.

Also in attendance was another BlogFriend, Amy from DiabetesMine. Now, there was also a guy who is trying to create and promote a site about prevention and healthy living. I didn't get his card, so I can't point to it, but even if I had it, I might not point to him anyway, to save him some embarrassment. Because, you see, he started talking at Amy about prevention and how she could have avoided getting diabetes in the first place. Amy happens to have the kind of diabetes that is caused by genetic factors. I guess her extremely petite frame wasn't a tip-off to this guy. I could feel her bristling in the seat next to mine. She let him talk for a little while...long enough to dig his own grave...then informed him that hers was an auto-immune disorder, so she didn't really think what he was talking about was relevant to her.

But it did make me think that even if she had the kind of diabetes that was lifestyle-oriented, she still would have been bristling, because there was something judgmental in the tone of what this guy was saying. And I'm sure he's not the only one. As we learn more and more about how our lifestyle...diet, exercise, smoking etc... contribute to various illnesses I think it's becoming more common to meter our sympathy based on how likely it is that the patient contributed to their own disease with poor choices.

On June 11th the news was full of a new report talking about the number of cases of diabetes worldwide. It has soared from 30 million to 230 million in the last two decades. most cases, it is true, can be attributable to changes in how we live...a move toward less active lifestyles and inexpensive convenience foods that are less healthy. This is happening in countries all aronud the world. Type 1 diabetes is "responsible for only 5 percent to 10 percent of cases and is not associated with behavior but rather is suspected of stemming almost entirely from genetic factors."

The huge and scary numbers indiciate this is far more than a person-by-person lack of willpower problem...there is a societal thing going on here...we are evolving societally in ways that are killing us physically! And "killing us" is quite literal. Check out this disturbing fact:

In some of the world’s poorest nations, the disease is a quick death sentence. While Americans can live for years with the disease, a person in Mozambique who requires injections of insulin can expect to live just a year; in Mali, such people survive about 30 months.

Still OK with blaming the victim?

technorati tags:bloggercon, enochchoi, amytenderich, diabetes

Update on marketing gone horribly wrong

Earlier this month I wrote about marketing gone horribly wrong at a Birmingham, AL cancer clinic. (Brief recap-they put out a freebie calendar for their customers...who are all terminal cancer patients, mind you...and the calendar sponsor was a local mortuary.)

Here's a little update from the next trip that my colleague's mother-in-law made to the clinic:

The calendars were still there, but someone had taken a sharpie and crossed out the mortuary name and information.

I believe that would be called anti-marketing now, right?

Medblogging joining the greater blog mainstream?

For a long time it seemed like medblogging was a world of its own. In all my other travels across the blogosphere...both in online channels and in the many offline opportunities that bloggers create, medbloggers weren't really a part of the picture. Enoch Choi was perhaps the only fellow medblogger that I regularly saw at blogging events, for example. And you never saw any focus on medblogs.

That seems to be changing. Enoch is leading a medblogging meet-up at Bloggercon this weekend, and more than one medblogger is on the general conference attendee list. More than that one enterprising medblogger has actually successfully pitched a full-day medblogging conference as an adjunct to a much larger traditional conference about consumer directed health care.

Dmitriy Kruglyak is the medblogger in question, and he has moved swiftly to plan a full day of seminars featuring both medbloggers and marketers...and one medblogger/marketer (that would be me.) The conference is set for November December in Washington DC.

It's really important to remember that industries are learning about blogging...its power and potential....only slowly, but certainly surely.

I spoke last week at a panel at the national conference for the American Advertising Federation. You'd think ad folks would be well up on the blogging phenomenon. I assure you, they were not. A tiny minority blogged. A tiny minority had clients who were asking about blogs. None of them knew what RSS was. None of them had heard of perhaps the most famous blogger: Robert Scoble. This despite the fact that news of his leaving Microsoft had made the news, even the traditional news.

I gave a presentation on blogging at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Acclerator complex) last month...obviously to people way more technical than I. But not up on their blogging, no way.

So, those of us who go around presenting about blogging may feel like we need to spice things up; we may think we have given the same presentation a hundred times and everyone must know all of it by now; we may feel we should throw in more acronyms and more widgets and more bleeding edge techniques.

Save it for your presentations at Web 2.0 conferences. If you're venturing into the rest of the world you gotta keep bringing it back to real world example and plain English explanations.

I hope Dmitriy's conference will do that for the medical community...because there is a lot of value to be found in medblogs.

I will post more info when I have it.

Did I mention the allergies?

Sorry, but as an allergy sufferer I am kind of obsessing about how bad the allergy season has been, at least here in the SF Bay Area. Here's another local article confirming it. [Free Reg. Req'd.]

It actually quotes the allergist I went to see about 4-5 years ago when I developed my allergy to alcohol out of the blue, Dr. Theodore Chu.

Of course he must not actually be an allergy suffer to make this article-closing quip:

"My surefire cure for allergies in the spring is to take a couple weeks in Hawaii,'' but, he warns his patients, ``insurance companies don't pay for that."

Ha ha ha. Very funny.

Well, you know what, Dr. Chu, insurance companies don't pay for prescription allergy medication either, now that Claritin is available over the counter!!

That was back when I was covered by UHC. I should see what Kaiser's policy is, I suppose.

I have been suffering, particularly this week, and the article doesn't leave me with much hope with this gloomy prognosis:

With less than one week to go before spring officially ends, there is some relief in sight. Bay Area hills have turned a pale brown, a sure sign that grasses will soon release less pollen -- probably by month's end, Chu said.

Of course, soon after, privets -- popular decorative shrubs -- will begin sending out pollen to waft about in the breeze. After that, weeds begin to bloom. And then there's mold, which is most prevalent from August through December.

Awesome.

Grand Rounds is up at the Medical Blog Network

Another banner week for Grand Rounds, hosted by the Medical Blog Network, as there are dozens of psots to peruse. Including my recent story about marketing gone horribly awry at a cancer clinic.

Don't miss tons of other posts and descriptions that leap out at you from the screen, though.

A couple that caught my eye:

Given my recent blogging about insomnia and napping, I had to take a look at Dr. Deborah Serani extolling the virtues of PowerNapping.

Given that I occasionally blog about reality TV shows American Idol and Project Runway over at my personal blog, I had to take a look Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments post on whether reality TV has descended into crude exploitation of sick people. Of course I like talent-show style reality TV, not these watch-people-in-a-fishbowl type of shows, so I had missed all the examples mentioned in the post.

There were nearly 50 submissions, though, so I'm just scratching the surface. Make sure you go scratch your own!

Sometimes all you can do is laugh

I have a friend whose partner, R.,  has been diagnosed with breast cancer and is now going through a treatment program that currently is scheduled to include 2 or 3 rounds of chemo, potentially followed by surgery and radiation. She's about my age, in her early 40s. Oddly enough, R.'s mother was diagnose
d with breast cancer in the same month that R. was, in her early 70s. What are the chances of that I wonder?

This story, though, isn't about the cancer so much as about marketing gone horribly horribly awry.

See, R.'s mom goes to a cancer clinic in Birmingham, AL. You know how sometime in small businesses of all kinds you'll find stacks of some freebie calendar that they're giving away. I mean, it's gotta be a pretty cheap way for a business to get its name out there, and the other business that agrees to put out the calendars can feel like they're giving their customers something for nothing, which looks good on them, right?

Well, in this Birmingham, AL cancer clinic the freebie calendar set out for customer pick-up is from a mortuary.

OK, so even if one can imagine the mortuary folks thinking, "well, gee, some percentage of those people are going to be in the market for our services in the relatively short-term...what fertile ground for acquiring new customers", one finds it much harder to imagine the office manager of the cancer clinic...or any other human being working there...thinking that it would be the best choice of material to be hanging around the office.

As my friend says: "sometimes you just have to laugh, because you get tired of crying."

Never say never: Finally appreciating naps

I wrote quite recently about last month being Better Sleep month, and about my own insomnia.

An up until quite recently I was known to say: "I can't sleep during the day." And "I can't fall asleep again once I'm up in the morning." Both of these things certainly used to be true. No matter the small number of hours slept in the night, I did not find myself tired enough to consider taking an afternoon nap, and if, by chance, I did give it a shot, I would lie there, not sleeping, trying to convince myself that "resting" was at least of some value. Same goes in the morning. Even if I got up, fed my cat, used the bathroom and went back to bed I would just like there and not fall asleep.

That has changed this year. It now seems that if I am exhausted by mid-afternoon, and I go lie down in bed, I will actually fall asleep, sometimes for just 45 minutes, sometimes for a couple of hours. If it falls on the short end of that contiuum I'm not entirely convinced it's beneficial, as I'll sometimes feel a bit out of it for quite a while after waking up. But a 1-2 hour nap? Does feel good.

And just this morning, I woke up at about 5:30, eventually got up, fed the cat, used the bathroom, went and laid down on the couch...and fell asleep again until almost 10:30AM. Yowsa. I literally cannot remember the last time I slept in like that!

Turning to the trusty Better Sleep Council I find that there's nothing wrong with an occasional nap. But if you're napping all the time, that's a sign of "sleep debt." Well, I really only have the opportunity to do it about once every 1-2 weeks, so I doubt that counts as "all the time." (Although I wish I could do it every day.)

I also learn that making up for lost sleep on the weekends is not the ideal method for dealing with persistent sleep debt. Guess I better go wake up the S.O. who is still asleep as we appraoch noon here.

I'd like to think that being able to sneak in naps is a sign of some newfound ability to manage my own thoughts so that I'm not keeping myself up with stress and worrying (like most with sleep problems do) but it's probably just a sign that, now being older, my body is winning out over my brain!