If you have diabetes, it is vital to your continued good health that your doctor is an excellent diabetes educator. This way, you can understand precisely how your body functions, and how diabetes affects your body. The more you understand about the human body and diabetes, the better off you will be, because you will be the first to know if a new symptom pops up. If your symptoms worsen or change at all, you will be able to quickly make an appointment with your healthcare provider and have the situation addressed promptly and effectively.
Your doctor should be a kind and empathetic person who is sensitive to the challenges which are faced by a person with diabetes, and who has plenty of advice to help their patients live healthy lives. How much do you know about how your body works, in reference to diabetes? Let’s take some time to learn more about diabetes.
When people eat food, the body breaks it down into simple sugar for the body to use as energy to do all the things the body needs to do. The pancreas is an organ in the abdomen which makes insulin. The insulin is necessary because it helps the body to process and use the sugar. If a person has diabetes, they do not make the amount of insulin that the body needs, or their body is resistant to using the insulin that it makes, and so they are not able to use the sugar for energy.
It might help if you think of the cells of the body as a locked house. Picture yourself as just having come home from the grocery store. You have sugar in a bag, and you want to take it inside, but you have locked your keys in the car. This means that you cannot get inside the house to put the sugar away. If the cell is a locked house, then insulin is your set of keys. You need your keys to get in the house, the same way that your cells need the insulin to unlock them, and allow the sugar inside.
Once the insulin unlocks the cell, the sugar can get inside and the cell can use the sugar from food as energy. This happens in every cell, all over the body, in all types of cells. This means that cells in your lungs which help you breathe, or heart cells which beat and help to pump blood, or even your skin cells which flake off if your skin gets too dry- they all need and use sugar. And if you have diabetes, your cells aren’t getting the sugar they need to function.
If you have diabetes, you may feel unwell, and your body might not function as efficiently as it would if you weren’t diabetic. You may also have other ill effects, such as nerve damage and poor circulation in your legs and feet, and blurry or damaged vision. In order to be as healthy as possible even with diabetes, you must make sure to have an exceptional care provider. How would you rate your care provider? If it is time for a change, call today.