Javed Butler Part 2, What Are The Goals When Treating A Patient With Diabetes

In part 2 of this Exclusive Interview, Javed Butler talks with Diabetes in Control Publisher Steve Freed about the four most important treatment goals when helping a patient who has diabetes.

Javed Butler, MD, MPH, MBA, is a cardiologist, professor, and chairman of medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Transcript of this video segment:

Freed: And what are the goals when you’re treating a patient with diabetes? What do you try to accomplish?

Butler: Yeah. So, that’s an unbelievably important question about which we don’t think enough. So, generically speaking one can say that any disease that you treat, you basically have four goals. So, the number one goal for treating any disease is for making patients feel better because that’s why they come to the doctors or the nurses in the first place. While you have these diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, which are largely asymptomatic, people don’t have symptoms. So, the symptom part is already taken care of. So then the second is to do things that will improve the underlying biology of the disease process. The third is that that treatment that is treating the underlying biology of the disease, that then should translate into improvement in secondary risk prevention, so stroke, myocardial infarction, chronic kidney disease, whatever the complications of that given disease is. And then lastly, all of this should hopefully translate into people living longer. So, it’s a spectrum, wherever we can modify things, we should modify, but we should try to reach all four aspects of the spectrum.

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