The worst scam to have hit the Indian subcontinent is the diabetes scam, costing the government Crores of rupees for providing basic tests, oral hypoglycemic drugs and insulin. And let us know that India leads the world in the number of diabetics. This means that after 40, most people are going to spend their hard earned money on treating the complications associated with diabetes, considering that most people in India do not possess sufficient insurance policies to bear the treatment. All the more important is the fact that all primary care physicians can prescribe drugs for diabetes, but not everyone can deal with correcting the pathophysiology associated with diabetes. The concept of clinical nutrition has to undergo tremendous changes. A non medical person is not competent enough to write a diet chart for diabetes because the pathophysiology is not known and that is where our system is an absolute failure. Doctors have to be tutored in nutrition and exercise therapy for various disease conditions if the change has to come by
It is as though everyone is bound to become a diabetic after 40, and of late it is hitting much earlier. Where does the problem lie? The most vital point is Consumerism. Everything that is advertised as healthy and with a ‘health’
Tag is assumed to be healthy. Nobody reads the nutritional information and most people do not have the basic education to do so. They are tricked by the marketing on television, to provide the wrong nutrition to their children, assuming it is healthy. It takes a couple of minutes for a mother to go through the nutritional chart pasted to the bottle to realise that they are again loading the child with empty calories. Then we ask what is the cause of diabetes?
Secondly, exam stress has overtaken every household. No parent ever tells her child to go out and play- the child is just picked up from school and dropped through numerous tuitions and returns home to collapse in front of the smart phone or TV. This amounts to total lack of physical activity and the process of becoming diabetic is underway.
By the time the child is in college, the girls have PCOD and the boys are already obese and insulin resistant. Every obese child is a potential diabetic. Intervention should start here. Multinationals who hire them put so much pressure that the diabetic young man in the course of his first five years of employment has heart attacks – silent ones too. Increased morbidity and mortality due to diabetes is the commonest health hazard today. Hence the blooming diabetes centres
The physician advises a few blood tests and asks to be physically active. The greatest advise given is not to eat rice, which is not possible in Tamilnadu. That is why most diabetics resign to the idea that they can just pop some pills and carry on. I wonder how many of them have been informed that there are 2 types of diabetes and some of them can be cured just with diet and exercise if caught young. Have they been told that rice is as good as any other carb and it can be eaten. Have they been given a personalized diet chart to suit their pocket ? Have they been given a exercise protocol to bring the insulin resistance down? Have they been told that the longer they continue to be diabetic and consume antidiabetic medication, the more complications they are going to face? No
Diabetes is a life style disease-we are talking about type 2 diabetes. Hence lifestyle changes should bring about phenomenal reduction in the number of diabetics. The focus has to shift . Reversal of the pathology of diabetes rests only in exercise and diet and medicines can help to a small extent. The present norm is to admit a diabetic patient every year for screening for complications. One fine day he is told that he has a kidney failure or retinal problem. These are permanent problems . Precision is needed in implementation of strategies for the prevention of diabetes. Diabetic cure is something which can be achieved in a majority of cases if caught early. We don’t need diabetic centres for India . We need diabetes prevention centres.
Prevention is the need of the hour. Not treatment