Diabetes

9 Pages 2156 Words

For thousands of years, doctors have recognized diabetes as a disease, but did not understand its’ cause. An early Egyptian medical text written around 1550 B.C. called the “Ebers Papyrus”, describes a condition of “passing too much urine”. The Greek physician Aretaeus living in the second century A.D. gave diabetes its name from a Greek word meaning “siphon” or “pass through”. Aretaeus observed that his patient’s bodies appeared to “melt down” into urine. Today, a cure still hasn’t found for this perplexing disease, but there are treatments for it. With all these treatments does diabetes still affect a person’s lifestyle? Do people realize how drastically ones life changes?
Let’s first discuss what diabetes is. The food you eat is broken down by the body into glucose. Glucose is a kind of sugar that is necessary for the body to survive. Glucose travels through your blood stream to your cells. Cells use the glucose for energy. For glucose to enter the cell it needs the help of insulin. When people have diabetes, there is a problem with the insulin. Sometimes there is no insulin. This is called Type I diabetes. In other cases there is insulin, but the body has trouble using it properly or there is not enough. This is called Type II diabetes and it is usually hereditary. The most common trigger for Type II diabetes is usually obesity. Age also plays a big role, half the cases occur in people over the age of fifty-five who have had an inactive lifestyle and consume a high calorie diet. On the other hand type I diabetes is usually brought on by an illness. In these cases the immune system mistakenly destroys the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas. It treats the cells as though they were foreign invaders. This is called an autoimmune response. (Taken from: Learning to Live Well with Diabetes)
Type I diabetes has two different treatments, needle therapy and pump therapy. Needle t...