Is Diabetes Medication Habit Forming?

by Varun
(India)

Medication habit forming

QUESTION: Dr. Alba,

Is it true that if you are diagnosed as a Type 2 Diabetic and put on medications for a long period of time, then your body gets used to it and one will never be able to come off the allopathic medications?

ANSWER: Hi Varun,

Generally, when a drug resistance occurs (i.e its effectiveness is reduced by time); it involves antibiotics or antineoplastic drugs.

With regards to lowering blood sugar drugs, the resistance involves mainly insulin (the substance normally produced by our body).

Specifically, type 2 diabetics do have insulin resistance (insulin is not produced or not working properly).

The use of drugs in type 2 diabetes aims to improve insulin resistance. So, the main goal is to help pancreas produce and secrete insulin or to help insulin in the peripheral cells while trying to put inside blood glucose.

Now, all these functions are not accomplish if drugs are used alone. Type 2 diabetics need to make changes in their lifestyle and diet strategies to have better success.

To help you understand better. If you are using Metformin, its main function is to:

- suppress glucose production in the liver

- improve insulin resistance (as mentioned above)

- inhibits the absorption of glucose from intestines

If you, let's say eat too much high-carb food; then, Metformin cannot succeed in its work although higher doses your doctor would prescribe.

Or, if you conduct a sedentary life; Metformin alone cannot improve insulin resistance because there are other factors (such as sedentary life, etc) that negatively affect its role.

At the end, it is crucial to understand that drugs alone or foods alone cannot help you succeed in beating type 2 diabetes.

Instead, altogether they can help you a lot. Furthermore, if your body gets to its normal activity (no excess production of glucose or no insulin resistance, etc); then, it would not be necessary to use drugs anymore.

However, you should be firm in conduction a healthy lifestyle, diet, and herbal use.

Hope it helped!

Dr.Alba

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Good reply
by: Nirms

hi,

it was an informative reply.

thanks
Nirms

Diabetes

I have a friend that takes two pills for diabetes and eat anything and how much she wants, I told her she was going to be taking dialysis if she didn't start eating right and exercising.

Exercising is not only for large people its for small ones too. I was taking metformin and juanuvia, now i only take metformin.

I am exercising, eating healthy, losing weight, and plan to be off metformin verysoon. America is needs healing for eating the right foods and leaving processed foods and meats(nasty) alone unless you grow them yourself.

America is killing us due to greed, (money)

Metformin or Naturopathy

QUESTION: Dr Alba,

You said that Metformin helps the pancreas and improves the insulin resistance. If that is the case, then why should an individual, when diagnosed with diabetes / pre-diabetes, keep trying to get the level down with natural medicines (in addition to exercise and diet control of course)?

Isn't it better to straight away start taking metformin and wait for your bodily functions (read pancreas) to become better and then keep it under check with naturopathy?

ANSWER: Hi,

Now, you are asking something that is very very deep in the "doctors work". Although it is a long answer, I will try to make it shorter and simple.

When a doctor has a patient newly diagnosed with diabetes, he/she will evaluate his general health status.

This is because the doctor will make sure the damages that diabetes has done are not severe.

Keep in mind that although a patient is recently diagnosed with diabetes, it is supposed that the last 10 years he/she has been living with diabetes or persistent high blood sugar levels.

If the patient's health status is not severely damaged, the doctor's first judgement is to put on diet and lifestyle changes regime for the first 3 months.

This is because, in this type of patient, the balance of glucose is broken due to his/her bad habits and we want to correct this broken balance naturally as it is naturally broken (unless there are other contribution factors like illicit drugs, etc).

If after three months, the patient's blood glucose is not well-controlled, then, the doctor will put on drug therapy.

In case the patient has cardio-vascular problems or kidney problems, or neuropathies, then, the doctor prescribes the medications because we want to prevent further damages.

The doctor asks for the patient to come after 3 months when he/she re-evaluates the health status of the patient and makes a decision whether to continue drug therapy, lower the dose or just natural steps.

As you may see, the doctor's job is not easy, and there are many many things he/she would consider before making a decision.

Hope it helped!

Dr.Alba

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