You know how it is. You have lots to do: writing, DIY, gardening, and yet time just drifts by, you know not where, and little of the work gets done. You blame yourself for slacking. You make resolutions to get fitter, more organised, more productive and then you look in the mirror and realise that you are not getting any younger. Can anything be done to roll back the years or should you just give in to middle age and go with the flow? The aging process is inevitable anyway so perhaps it is only right that you should take your rest on the settee and after all who is going to stop you?
Sounds familiar? This was my situation a few years ago but I was wrong to put my feet up just yet. I was not so much getting older as sicker. My illness had slipped up quietly while I wasn't looking and laid me out flat. It was only when I realised I was getting up several times a night to go to the bathroom and conversely drinking pint after pint of water to assuage a thirst that wouldn't go away that I realised something was seriously wrong with my body. I soon discovered that the reason I could barely get up in the morning and my eyesight had gone all blurry wasn't because I had left youth behind me with my flared trousers and long hair. Rather it was because my heart was pumping red coloured honey round my veins. In short I had diabetes.
Now as any diabetic will tell you, the business of having to inject insulin up to four times a day is not a big deal. Of course it is unpleasant at first and you wish you didn't have to do it but you very quickly get used to sticking needles in yourself. The fact that you will die if you stop taking insulin is a powerful incentive for getting over any squeamish feelings you might have about injections. However what is a much greater worry are the implications of diabetes. For over and above the day to day problem of keeping your blood sugar at a near-normal level, there is the question of long-term degenerative disease. It is an unfortunate fact that the longer you have diabetes the more likely you are to suffer from blindness, nerve damage, gangrenous toes, impotence and kidney failure. The prognosis for diabetics who have had the condition for more than ten years is not good and makes very depressing reading for the newly diagnosed. All you can do, or so we are told, is do your best to keep your blood sugar levels normal by a combination of careful diet, regular exercise and those all important injections or tablets.
Yet is this really all there is to it? Why is it that a simple illness resulting from a failure to produce enough insulin in the pancreas has such wide-ranging and disastrous side effects even when insulin is supplied artificially by injection? Shouldn't this in itself be enough to put right the wrong and ensure a healthy and long life? This is the question I asked myself when I was first diagnosed and told about the long term implications. As a result I began to experiment with such things as acupuncture, diet and meditation. I very quickly realised that, in the short term at least, my feeling of well-being was greatly helped if besides injecting insulin I also took large, oral doses of vitamin C and the B group vitamins. I also noticed that if I stopped taking these for even quite short periods of time that my general condition became worse. Then, even with reasonably controlled blood-sugar levels, I felt unwell. I assumed that this was because in some way the diabetes was "eating up" these essential vitamins and that that was the reason they needed supplementing. However there is more to it than that and for this information I am greatly indebted to a Dr Julian Whitaker, who wrote an article entitled "Reducing the Risk of Complication from Diabetes: Non-Traditional Treatment."
I believe Dr. Whitaker's article to be so important that I am posting it up on this website. His thesis is very simple. Because diabetes, the "pissing disease" as it was known in the past, is characterised by increased urination, diabetics rapidly lose water-soluable vitamins from their systems. These losses are so marked that they cannot be made good by simply eating a normal diet. Because of this most diabetics, (at least those who are not able to keep their blood-sugar levels within the very narrow tolerances that one can call normal) suffer from severe vitamin and mineral deficiencies. It is these deficiencies that lead to the terrible side-effects such as retinopathy, peripheral neuropathy, peripheral vascular disease and kidney disease that cause so much distress in the longer term.
If you are diabetic yourself I would urge you to read Dr. Whitaker's article. If you have a family member, friend or colleague who is, please copy it and pass it on. This information could be life-saving for them. Vitamin and mineral supplements are readily available from health food shops and chemists but make sure that the ones you take are fairly concentrated. Mostly you need to take them at doses well above the recommended daily intake in order for them to be of much help. The notable exception is vitamin D which is toxic in large quantities. Consult Dr Whitaker's book Reversing Diabetes (obtainable through Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk and all good bookshops) for further details on dietary supplements.
Copyright © 2000 Adrian G Gilbert