My father was a tough guy.  In the style of his era that meant he wore a hat with the brim slightly angled over one eye.  It meant that he favored movies starring George Raft or Humphrey Bogart, tough guys, who, like my father, smoked Camels and could hold their liquor. That was about all it took to be a tough guy, cruelty had nothing...

Two things run strong and hard on both sides of my family: heart disease and type 2 diabetes. As a deluge of medical research tells us, the two are closely linked. Often diabetes precedes heart disease, but in my family–particularly on my father’s side–it goes both ways. My dad had his first heart attack when he...

Among the interesting studies announced at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) Scientific Sessions 2010 was a head-to-head comparison of two new incretin-based drugs for type 2 diabetics.  The full, one-year data presented at the meeting showed that Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 analog Victoza outperformed Merck & Co’s DPP-4 inhibitor...

The other day, Chris Bishop (Type 1 Tidbits) wrote a very compelling blog post called “Diabetic Superheroes.” He said, rightfully, that anyone who deals with a chronic condition is a superhero and deserves to be recognized as such, especially since it’s such a thankless job. A number of people (including many medical...

When my mother was diagnosed with diabetes in her early 70s, long before her memory started to deteriorate, she immediately went out and bought two AccuCheck machines in case one broke. She kept them side by side on the dining room table, next to a squadron of test strip vials. The thought of being unable to monitor her blood sugar...

Our family jokes about how our dinner conversation is always in regard to what is on the menu for the next meal.  We like to eat.  We like to eat almost anything, although we also consider ourselves gastronomical snobs.  None of us ever stops in at a fast food joint, even in a dire emergency.  Food is just too respected among us to...

David Mendosa’s Diabetes Directory was one of the first, and is now one of the largest, websites focusing on diabetes. The site includes approximately 1,000 of his articles about diabetes and an annotated directory to more than 1,400 diabetes-related websites, which are described and linked in the Online Diabetes Resources area. Every...