Letter From The Editor

Today we have a group of 50 cyclists from our bike club in St. Petersburg, here in Mt. Dora, Florida for 4 days of riding. On Friday we had about 20 in our group and finished up 65 miles in 3 1/2 hours. The ride involved a lot of climbing …

Our diabetes patients offer suffer from depression and we will blame it on the disease, when there is actually a clinical reason for their depression. This association of diabetes and depression is sometimes so great that patients don’t get the proper treatment for depression; over time this makes their diabetes …

Last week we had 4 new interns start their PharmD rotations with us. They all have great knowledge of drugs for diabetes. As we were discussing technology for managing and treating diabetes, all of them felt patients and healthcare professionals should use the latest whiz-bang devices and were surprised when …

This week the FDA approved the oral GLP-1 analog, semaglutide (Rybelus) for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. This is the first oral medication in the class that includes liraglutide, exenatide and dulaglutide. The secret of making this work orally is a medium chain fatty acid, and our intern Nour …

Quite often we see patients that we feel should lose some weight, but when we do the labs and physical checkup everything else seems perfect. That makes it hard to really talk to the patient about losing weight, but now Nadeen Ayad, BCPS, PharmD Candidate, University of Colorado, has researched …

Although, for most of us reading this week’s newsletter, the idea of giving a GLP-1 mimetic in a once a week shot presents no problem, there are many patients who could never tolerate even one shot per year. This can present a problem and cause prescribers to choose other medications. …

Lately I have been hearing a lot of commercials for a weight loss program called Noom. According to their sponsor ad on our local NPR station, they offer success through small consistent goals, high touch and constant motivation. They accomplish this with the use of texts, videos and audios that …

When I was working as an insulin pump trainer we would have patients who needed upwards of 200 units a day. These patients would have to change the cartridge in their pump every couple of days rather than the normal 3-5 days most patients could do. One of our solutions …

We missed the hurricane here in Tampa Bay, but the temperature has really cranked up. This morning when we finished our 43 mile ride the temp had hit 91 degrees and the heat index was 106, and that was at 11 AM. When these conditions exist it is not unusual …

Last week I was working on a project, and it seemed like I was spending my whole day looking at spreadsheets and pivot tables. As the day went by I kept making the numbers larger to make it easier to read, and finally I had to give up for a …