Since 75% of patients with type 2 diabetes are estimated to check their blood sugar and there are over 29 million Americans with type 2 diabetes, and blood sugar monitoring is moderately expensive (though better than it used to be), not checking blood sugars could save billions of dollars a year. But that's not all. The energy used to focus on those numbers, by patients, doctors, and nurses, could be focused on something that might actually matter, like increasing physical exercise or eating a more healthy diet.
To be absolutely clear, this information does not apply to all diabetics. Insulin dependent diabetics, who usually get their disease as children, and absolutely require insulin to survive, do need to check their sugars. For those patients it's vital to know the blood sugar so that an appropriate amount of insulin can be administered to keep sugars as close to normal as possible. Even type 2 diabetics who use insulin often need to know their blood sugar levels in order to adjust their insulin dosages. Some type 2 diabetics take medication and a regular dose of long acting insulin, and it would be interesting to know if they, too, could forego testing.
Checking blood sugars is not simple, though it is a procedure that most people learn pretty quickly. It involves pricking the finger with a lancet to draw a drop of blood, placing the blood on a paper or plastic strip which is then read by a little machine which displays a number. There are talking machines for patients who are blind, there are machines with fancy functions, expensive machines, and cheap machines. You can buy a machine without a prescription at places like Wal-Mart and even buy the test strips over the counter now. It is, however, just one more thing to fit into a busy day and the numbers can make a person feel like a failure if they are high. The monitors require a certain amount of maintenance and sometimes malfunction, leading a person to make unnecessary adjustments or phone calls to health care providers.
This study does have some caveats. Many of the patients in the group that did not test blood sugars had been testing their blood sugars already, so it is possible that they had already gotten valuable information from testing. The patients were told to check their blood sugars once daily. It could have been than testing more frequently would have given better information and been more effective. For instance, if a patient didn't know that their lunch of yogurt and a ham sandwich lead to a higher blood sugar in the evening than a lunch of soup and salad, he or she might not change their diet appropriately.
Despite these issues, this study does indicate that we can safely allow many of our type 2 diabetics to stop routine monitoring. Previous studies have alluded to this, and many physicians are already backing away from badgering patients with type 2 diabetes to check their blood sugars. Nevertheless is remains common and is a way that a patient might misallocate time away from something active and directly beneficial to their health. It is probably time to allow many of our patients to relegate that blood smeared glucose meter to the back of the bathroom cabinet.
Janice Boughton, MD, ACP Member, practiced in the Seattle area for four years and in rural Idaho for 17 years before deciding to take a few years off to see more places, learn more about medicine and increase her knowledge base and perspective by practicing hospital and primary care medicine as a locum tenens physician. She lives in Idaho when not traveling. Disturbed by various aspects of the practice of medicine that make no sense and concerned about the cost of providing health care to every American, she blogs at Why is American Health Care So Expensive?, where this post originally appeared.
