Barney Softness: You can see by listening to Laura’s story that she exemplifies what we hope to get out of insulin pumps. Insulin pumps are dramatic benefit for people with diabetes. Type I Diabetes is a failure of your pancreas to secrete adequate amounts of insulin. Insulin is the hormone that keeps our blood sugar normal. Without it, the food we eat would raise or blood sugar and that creates a whole host of other metabolic problems. And insulin brings your blood sugar back down to normal. So, people with diabetes need insulin virtually around the clock.
Currently, there are a couple of different models. They’re all basically the same. This is one representative brand. You can see that basically it’s small, easy to carry around. And in this unit is a supply of insulin as well as the electronics that allows someone to, by pushing these buttons, a little bit like the cell phone, a little bit like your iPod, you can program it to give you insulin as it’s supposed to. And then attached to this pump is a thin, thin tubing. And this then attaches to a little site that if this were one skin, well, just like Laura did it on her stomach or her leg. This is the insulin site into the skin.
This particular model is entirely self-contained. This is the insulin and out of the bottle of this comes that tiny little catheter. So, this goes on your body sort of like that. And it’s all self-contained. And then you carry around another gizmo. Looks like this. So, this is on your body. This is by infrared is the electronics and makes it go. The catheter of the insulin pump is inserted into the skin. It can really be almost anywhere but it’s best inserted in a place where the little bit of extra-loose skin or a little bit of fat because it anchors itself better and the insulin has a little room to move. You wouldn’t put it on the skin over bony surface for instance.
For most people, that ends up being their abdomen and around their back and use the upper back and even the buttocks. The catheter which always has a little bit of insulin going in actually usually gets a little old after about two days, either it becomes a little bit obstructed or the insulin doesn’t work as well, you can get a little kink in the catheter, so, we strongly encourage everyone to change their catheter every two days or so.
Pumps have made a huge difference in how we can control diabetes. Our control of diabetes is much better than it used to be. And I think that the impact for us is going to be huge because ten, twenty years ago, we were sort of satisfied with worst bunch of control. And we used to see even as young as ten year olds and fifteen and twenty year olds, the chronic ailments that prolonged diabetes could cause.
Nowadays, we’re expecting people to go 30, 40, 50 years with no ill effects of high blood sugar because with the pump, they can probably keep their blood sugar perfectly normal for decades.
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