Living with Diabetes and Integrated Support
Tarzana Treatment Centers (TTC) understands that living with diabetes is not easy. Many people do not understand that managing a chronic condition often is exhausting and overwhelming for many people. In the spotlight of these challenges, TTC focuses on helping people with diabetes effectively manage their disease. Indeed, the goal of our integrated support is to provide you with the freedom you need to live a healthy and fulfilling life.
Moreover, TTC addresses the challenge of living with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Mostly appearing in childhood, type 1 diabetes means a person’s body does not produce insulin. Most often appearing later in life, type 2 diabetes is when a person’s body does not respond well to insulin or does not produce enough insulin. Although type 2 often is considered milder than type 1, it also leads to major health complications while demanding constant management.
Given the dangers, TTC never minimizes the daily challenges of living with diabetes. As a chronic condition, both type 1 and type 2 diabetes require that self-care to be a priority. Such healthcare priorities cannot be ignored, even during difficult times of emotional upheaval. Often frustrating and beyond their control, people living with diabetes face many necessities.
Daily Necessities and Challenges of Living with Diabetes
These daily necessities often include:
- Monitoring Blood Glucose Levels
- Self-administering multiple injections
- Avoiding the temptation of refined sugar
- Maintaining access to healthy foods
- Keeping easy access to diabetic supplies
- Managing comorbidity and multimorbidity
Although it sounds like quite a scary word, the definition of comorbidity is when more than one illness or disease occurs in a person at the same time. Multimorbidity is when more than two illnesses or diseases occur in the same person at the same time. Although multimorbidity sounds extreme, it happens all the time. For example, a diabetic taking an antidepressant for depression who comes down with a cold experiences multimorbidity.
What is essential in the ongoing management of the condition is not to allow other conditions to get in the way of diabetic management. Even in the common example above, living with diabetes means not allowing depression to prevent you from managing your condition. When you have a cold, is a support system in place to make sure you do not run out of supplies? Moreover, during the recent pandemic, these everyday challenges became so much harder.
Diabetes Distress and the Price of Living with Diabetes
Living with diabetes often goes together with mental health issues and substance use disorders. Given TTC’s experience treating both, please check out the pages dedicated exclusively to diabetes and mental health issues, and diabetes and substance use disorder. However, beyond the challenges that everyone else in the world faces, people living with diabetes have challenges that are quite specific to the disease.
For example, diabetes distress is a challenge that is specific to the disease. Diabetes distress underlines the reality that living with diabetes can be overwhelming. The relentless burden of managing the disease leads to diabetes distress. Overcome by demands, daily stressors dominate a person’s thinking and outlook on life. According to a 2015 study, diabetes distress affects twenty to twenty-five percent of people living with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes.
The key is to make sure that diabetes distress does not worsen, becoming diabetes burnout. A result of prolonged diabetes distress, diabetes burnout is when a person living with diabetes succumbs to a state of physical or emotional exhaustion. Unable to take care of themselves, many of these people need to be hospitalized, or demand intensive supervision and care.
Living with Diabetes = You Are Not Alone + Progress, not Perfection
When a healthcare professional sees that a patient is ignoring self-care and missing medical appointments, it often is a sign of diabetes distress. What proves fascinating is that diabetes distress often is treated by raising awareness of the commonality of the problem. Once a patient realizes that they are not alone, they feel more empowered to manage their condition.
When it comes to managing people living with diabetes, the key is to replace self-blaming with empowerment. Many people feel guilty that they do not handle the demands of living with diabetes well enough. By showing support, these patients are brought back into the fold.
After all, like in the management of other chronic diseases, the key to long-term success and health is progress and not perfection. Nobody needs to be perfect, but patients need to be willing to take small steps in the right direction.
Living with Diabetes Support Equals Professionalism and Empathy
As a provider of integrated healthcare services, Tarzana Treatment Centers realizes that living with diabetes requires empathetic professionalism from medical providers. For example, here are some basic rules that help raise the quality of TTC’s care:
- Do not make assumptions about a patient. Listen to what he or she has to say.
- Be respectful when inquiring about eating habits. Avoid judgmental language.
- Avoid reductive terminology that potentially leads to stigma like “diabetic.”
- Ask open questions to learn about behavioral issues like blood glucose management.
- Look for signs of diabetes distress like, “My diabetes wears me out. I hate it.”
- Address feelings and take them seriously. Do not downplay emotions.
- Normalize hardships and be inclusive: “Many people living with diabetes feel this way.”
By focusing on a holistic perspective that considers all the challenges of living with diabetes, TTC provides integrated care. By placing emotional wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing, and physical wellbeing on the same table, acceptance and healing are the priorities. Finally, everything cannot be solved in a single consultation. Understanding the big picture, living with diabetes becomes a process of progressive and positive management over time.