Letter from the Editor: The Other Holiday “Food Drive”

Now that Thanksgiving is over, it is time for our patients to start their annual “food drive.” I don’t mean collecting food for charities: I am referring to them eating as much food as possible over the next four weeks. This is the time of year most of our patients give up on their health and enjoy the fruits of the holidays. They justify it with the promise of New Year’s resolutions, new programs, diets, and magic exercise equipment, and two weeks later the equipment is in the closet, the diets are long gone and our patients are carrying the extra weight into the next year. Now there may be a way to help avoid the rush to extra pounds. This week the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid announced that Medicare will pick up the tab for obesity screening and intensive behavioral counseling with targets, and if our patients meet these targets, then maybe there’s some hope of averting some of the damage from the annual “food drive.”

We might be able to help our patients do a better job of caring for their weight and diabetes if we share the information in Item 12, Research Finds Obesity Negatively Impacts Income, Especially for Women, that points to the income level differences of obese vs. normal weight patients. With this information they might even want try out our Product of the Week, the Striiv personal trainer.

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Announcements:

NEW CME! CardioCareLive will offer live online video CME at No Cost on Wednesday, Dec. 7, and Thursday, Dec. 8, covering the Johns Hopkins Medicine CME, “Preventing Crisis in Cardiology Care: Roadmap to the Future.” 13 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits will be available. See our CME page for all of CardioCareLive’s enduring CME available now and for links to sign up for next week’s course.

dLife.com: December 3, 7PM ET on CNBC

Topics: A look at diabetes nerve damage and treatments available to ease the pain. And Jim Turner gives a first-hand account of how it feels to have a blood sugar low. Sundays on CNBC at 7 PM ET, 6 PM CT, and 4 PM PT. Catch up on dLife.com.

Please answer this week’s poll: Should patients on a long-acting basal insulin of more than 30 units split the dose into twice a day?

Vote in and then see results from previous polls here.

Check out this week’s “Test Your Diabetes Knowledge” question!

Dave Joffe, Editor-in-chief