As many of you may know, two of our children have become Type 1 Diabetic. As part of their change in how the body functions, they are both choosing to wear a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to help …
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As many of you may know, two of our children have become Type 1 Diabetic. As part of their change in how the body functions, they are both choosing to wear a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to help them monitor their blood sugar, but without having to constantly prick their fingers. The improvement in overall quality of living was instant and notable, drastically reducing the amount of waste generated. It also helped with alarms for low and high blood sugar situations, to help us sort out what is going on. Pediatric or childhood Type 1 Diabetes onset is often chaotic, as the body's changes through the teenage years can radically impact how your body handles blood sugar and insulin, so the monitors have helped tremendously.
What I didn't know until today was that there are a great many people in the health and wellness world who are using CGM's to monitor their blood sugar for a variety of other reasons. The BBC News had an article entitled Going down the 'rabbit hole' of wearable blood-sugar monitors in which they went into this growing trend. Many health-conscious people, and some medical researchers, are using CGM's in non-diabetic people to assess various situations where your blood sugar could be a health indicator for other things. I say "other things" because it isn't always about finding disease or other infirmity, but many are using CGM's to assess other health choices and the impacts they have on the body.
Here is where I have a huge "hiccup" in my thinking. I applaud the idea and the pursuit of finding out if general blood sugar is actually a more meaningful and useful health indicator. Our personal experience with our diabetic children has been that a CGM is a notable increase in quality of life. It helps minimize the finger pokes and all the other gear one has to carry around to live with Diabetes. This is especially true for Type 1 Diabetics, as their pancreas no longer functions at all, and they are completely reliant upon insulin to function. Maybe all this CGM research will help find solutions to problems we don't even realize we have.
