Diabetes In Control. A free weekly diabetes newsletter for Medical Professionals. News and information for Medical Professionals.
Last week I started two patients on V-GO devices. For those of you who are not familiar with the device it is a simple mechanical (not electrical) device that can deliver a basal of 20, 30, or 40 units of insulin a day and allow your patients to deliver up to 36 units of mealtime insulin in 2 unit increments with a touch of a couple of buttons.
One of the patients was a 55 y/o overweight type 2 woman who was not being controlled on orals alone. She was scared to death of needles and would have never used a pen or syringe because she could see the needle. The advantage of the V-Go is that the patient never sees the needle and they only have to pierce the skin once a day. We placed her on 30 unit/day basal rate and had her take 2 clicks (4 units with each meal).
After 3 days the patient’s glucose levels had dropped about 70 mg/dl on average and she was excited by the change. She told me that she would have never used a needle to give herself a shot and still wouldn’t. Since that time I have come to realize that the V-GO would be a great device for helping patients who have never been on insulin get started, and I have been talking to doctors about the idea of giving the patient a starter kit to let them see if they can do it as a way to get them to overcome the fear of needles and insulin. The really cool thing is that in addition to getting your patients to start on basal insulin, they also get to start on mealtime insulin which often takes practitioners years to get to because of the extra shot burden.
If you have ever thought that it was the needle and not the insulin that scared people, you were correct and using a V-GO sample pack to help your patients "try insulin" could certainly help us provide better care.
If you are going to be at the AADE next week, please stop by and see us at the Diabetes in Control booth (#234).
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Dave Joffe, Editor-in-ch