I’ve been feeling burnt out about work, and so I recently forced myself to spend a weekend untethered from my phone, not checking email, and not responding to calls. The two days felt longer than normal, I didn’t miss anything important, and I emer…
It’s day one of the 5th annual Diabetes Blog week (organized by the amazing Karen Graffeo at Bittersweet Diabetes), and today’s topic is “Change the World.” The assignment? “Let’s kick off Diabetes Blog Week by talking about…
...myself, “Hey, Catherine. Maybe it’s not such a big deal!” something always seems to come up to snap me out of my reverie. An example of this happened just yesterday, when I received a safety notice from the FDA about Shasta Technologies&rs…
As I have written about previously on ASweetLife, I – like many other people with diabetes – was disappointed by the factual inaccuracies and misapprehensions in the New York Times’ recent piece, titled “Even Small Medical Advances Can …
Great news: the Arizona State Legislature has approved the restoration of insulin pump coverage for adults in the state’s Medicaid program (known as AHCCCS)! This is partially thanks to an enormous patient-led Twitter campaign over the past few weeks to …
...healthy life in spite of my disease. I would have asked that the article better address why Catherine Haley, the woman with Type 1 diabetes whose story is featured in the piece, would bother to save up for an insulin pump – which she describes as bein…
As I mentioned earlier, today marks a huge day in the diabetes community’s collaboration with the FDA, the government agency in charge of regulating America’s drugs and medical devices: Courtney Lias, the director of the division at the FDA that re…
Ain’t no party like an FDA party. I’m being serious. This Monday, March 31st, the FDA’s Courtney Lias and StripSafely.com‘s Bennet Dunlap will be hosting a live chat about blood glucose meters — and you’re invited. Lias is t…
UPDATE: When this article was published, there were approximately 30 public comments about competitive bidding on the CMS website. (The CMS document was about all sorts of durable medical equipment, not just insulin pumps.) As of today, there are 179 public co…
...— complications from diabetes. Providing insulin pump coverage to Arizona’s adult Medicaid recipients would cost about $105,000 per year, roughly the price of six total emergency room visits. At the moment AZ is the only state besides Alabama no…
