Letter From The Editor

On April 16, President Obama signed into law the Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act. This law does away with the sustainable growth rate (SGR) for Medicare payments for patient care, which was designed to hold down spending and consistently reduce physician payments. Under the new law, …

Usually, when a patient has a side effect from a diabetes drug, medical professionals find that the patient never wants to use the medication again. For years, we have seen older patients who say they have a penicillin allergy and won’t allow us to prescribe any related drug even though …

Beta cells are very important in the production of insulin as we all know, and when our patients are developing diabetes they actually turn up insulin production in the beta cells, so that when they are diagnosed many patients are actually making a lot of insulin. However this overproduction of …

It seems that patients often fall into two categories when they get diagnosed with diabetes. They either get serious and try to do everything to reverse their disease or they just ignore it and figure it will go away. This week our Clinical Mastery Series newsletter looks at both categories. …

For years we at Diabetes in Control have advocated a lower carbohydrate diet with protein and fat increases to manage diabetes. Over time many mainstream organizations and diabetes care facilities have adjusted their thinking and one of our long term advisory board members, Dr. Richard Bernstein, is no longer ostracized …

In the state of Florida there is a law in the statehouse to give drug prescribing privileges to Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants. Supporters of the bill say there is an acute shortage of prescribers in many areas which prevents patients from getting care. This could be attributed to the …

Over the past few weeks Dr. Stanley Schwartz has been looking at the causes and reasons that insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia go crazy when a patient develops diabetes. This week, in the last part of the series, he brings to light the use of a couple of older medications and …

Last week we had a 56 y/o female patient who worked for the county schools as a bus driver. She has less than a year till retirement and was worried because she might lose her job because of her elevated A1c. She has had diabetes for 12 years and her …

CMS just rolled out the new five-star ratings for hospitals and the results are less than stunning. Out of 3,500 hospitals, twice as many hospitals received one or two stars as those receiving five stars. The new ratings are part of a broader initiative by the federal agency to use a …

On Monday I was in Kentucky visiting my sister and my dad, and I rented a bike for a couple of days’ riding. When I told one of my sister’s friends that I would probably ride about 30-40 miles each day she looked at me and said, "You don’t need …