Cheating Destiny : Living with Diabetes, America’s Biggest Epidemic by James S. Hirsch.
[amazon
I found this book because I saw James Hirsh interviewed on Jeanne Blake’s show. He was pretty interesting so I thought I’d read the book. It’s quite good. He was diagnosed with Type 1 at age 15, and the book came about as a result of his son being diagnosed at age 3. It intersperses Hirsh’s experience with historical tales including a brief biography of Banting and Best, Elliot Joslin, and some of the other early pioneers in treatment, and interviews with many involved in current research and treatment.
It’s also a scathing indictment of the current health care system, but then to anyone who has had any interaction with it, this is old news. Still, it does put numbers and names to many of the issues. With all the things that have been going on in my life recently, I just don’t have the energy to be outraged, but if I did, there’s plenty of ammunition here. For example: NIH spending for each West Nile Virus patient: $16,936; spending for each diabetes patient: $68. Spending for 2007 has been cut by 2.1 million. Consider this while realizing that the newly released figures on the cost of this disease is now pegged at 174 billion (with a b) dollars per year (in the US only), an increase of over $40B in just five years.
His navigation of the health care system is one that anyone with this disease can relate to. Doctors who don’t know enough and aren’t willing to find out; insurance companies looking to reduce their risk to this horrifically expensive disease yet aren’t willing to spend for prevention; the list goes on and on. He also makes the excellent point that people without this disease (including much of the medical establishment) view insulin as a sort of cure. He also spends considerable amount of time analyzing why there is no cure for Type 1 yet, when it’s been promised “Real Soon Now” for decades.
One thing that did surprise me was just how recent some of the tools and techniques are. (I was diagnosed in 2002.) For example, home glucose monitors weren’t available until the 1990’s. After I read that, though, I though about it and it does make sense. I mean, PC’s weren’t invented until 1984 or so, and that was just the start of miniaturization. It’s only been fairly recently that something as small as a BG monitor could be made small and accurate enough for home use.
This book is tremendous and I hope to meet James Hirsh one of these days, and as he’s a local guy, it might happen.
