A new book and a Q&A on Substack
The numbers are hard to ignore. One in every four dollars spent on healthcare in the United States goes to treating diabetes and its complications. The cost to society is estimated at over $400 billion a year, more than $1 billion every day. Over $300 billion are in direct medical costs, covering the care for the 30 million Americans who have been diagnosed with diabetes. Another 8 to 9 million have diabetes but have yet to be diagnosed and don’t yet know it.
A disease that was vanishingly rare in the 19th Century now afflicts one in every nine Americans.
Diabetes therapies are better than ever. Diabetes is less of a burden for the patients who suffer from it than ever before, and yet it’s still considered a chronic, progressive disease that will require more and better drugs or higher doses as time goes on. Half of all patients with diabetes are failing to meet the relatively liberal blood sugar goals of the American Diabetes Association.
Obvious questions: how did this happen and is anyone responsible? Are these problems that can really be solved by yet more (expensive) drugs and better devices? Were mistakes made in how we think about this disease and how we treat it?
My new book, Rethinking Diabetes, addresses all of this and it’s out today.
I have a Q&A on the Unsettled Science substack addressing these questions and others.
Please read, comment, pass along, and share. I look forward to hearing what you think.
