Diabetes Rate Up 90% in Last 10 Years

Washington University, in a NIH-funded grant request in 2005 to study ginseng and its blood sugar modulating effects, called diabetes an epidemic. They predicted 10% of the US population would be type II diabetic within the year. Their predictions have proven to be all-too-accurate. US health officials have indicated that the rate of new type II diabetes cases soared by 90% in the US during the past decade. The problem is most common in the southern states where rates of obesity are skyrocketing. Even the American Diabetes Association indicates the rates of diabetes have yet to level.
While the diagnosis often shortens lives and creates a complex web of additional complications that range from neuropathy, retinopathy, kidney dysfunction, and failure-to-heal wounds leading to 150,000 amputations in the US each year, there is a staggering financial toll. Two new federally-funded studies published in the current Archives of Internal Medicine reveal that diabetic Americans doubled their spending on drugs for their disease in the last 6 years. Last year’s bill was an eye-popping $12.5 billion. More patients got multiple drugs as new classes of drugs came onto the market. Yet, few studies lasted longer than 6 months. And findings indicate that the widely prescribed Avandia may increase the risk of heart disease death. Avandia costs nearly 8 times the bill for generic metformin a month. The FDA has received a petition to ban Avandia after the American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes unanimously advised against using Avandia; click here to read more http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122537774874284331.html.
Most puzzling of all is the lack of attention in American government public health circles to the 30-years of government funded research on chromium and blood sugar control as well as insulin sensitivity, the published lifestyle focused research from Walter Willett, MD, MPH and his colleagues at Harvard, and the latest published research from the scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association. Click here http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/printerfriendlynews.php?newsid=127776
to read the study that demonstrated that patients with diabetes who participate in a program that combined aerobic exercise along with resistance movements demonstrated improved blood sugar control, physical feats, and body fat composition.
Integrative physicians have been the targets of their respective state boards of medicine for decades relating to their use of lifestyle-based medicine along with the medical use of clinical nutrition. Their success rate exceeds 90% as documented by the above mentioned research.  Please SUPPORT the efforts of ANH-USA to protect the rights of practitioners to practice and consumers to choose.
From Deborah A. Ray, MT(ASCP)
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