Does Diabetes Hurt?

By David Spero In 2008, I wrote a five-part series on chronic pain and diabetes. Pain hasn't gone anywhere, and people still aren't talking about it much. But new research is helping us understand pain better and treat it more effectively. First the bad news — the amount of pain people with diabetes have is staggering. A study of over 13,000 adults with Type 2 diabetes by researchers in California found that nearly half report significant pain. A University of California, San Francisco, press release stated, "Patients in the study reported significant pain and nonpain symptoms [such as insomnia and depression] across the entire course of the disease, among all age groups, with prevalence increasing as people neared the end of their lives." Lead author Rebecca Sudore, MD, said, "Adults living with Type 2 diabetes are suffering from incredibly high rates of pain, at levels similar to patients living with cancer." That phrase "similar to patients living with cancer" really threw me. I mean, cancer is awful, and often brings terrible pain, but people with cancer don't have to do much besides fight to live and hope their treatments work. They can focus a lot of energy on reducing pain, and their doctors are likely to at least try to help. But for people with diabetes, no matter how much pain they're in, they still have to focus on controlling their blood glucose levels. Rather than figuring out, "how can I get comfortable?" they may have to make themselves less comfortabl...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs