I'm having a blonde moment. The headline reads: cases of undiagnosed diabetes drop sharply. As if this is good news. The article continues - the number of men in the United States with undiagnosed diabetes has declined sharply over the past 25 years. Like I said, I'm blonde. Maybe somebody can help me correlate this to good news for us diabetics.

I have a larger than life question mark looming over my head. A recent news story alluded to the fact that the death toll for women over the last 30 years shows little to no improvement over diabetic men. I think I get it now. The net continues to harvest whole, healthy bodies. Shrimp caught in nets are complete animals. Only once they are dumped onto the boat (let's call the boat "diabetes") are their heads removed (i.e., no turning back to the sea now) Good old Charleston summers! Well diabetics are not shrimps, but as the holes in the net get smaller -- more shrimp are being caught.

So what's does this look like? The number of diabetes diagnosis is on the rise. The long-term complications are on the rise. The cost of treatment (you guessed it) is on the rise. U.S. sales of diabetes drugs reached $9.8 billion in 2005. Sadly, all this money isn't yielding better outcomes for the growing diabetes patient population. So where's the success in this story? Well, if you're in the business of diabetes - it's a jackpot. You didn't let too many get away.

Lately the news has seen a lot of devastating diabetic events due to hypoglycemic unawareness. Hypoglycemic unawareness is commonly defined as an inability to recognize the symptoms (sweating, tremor, hunger, anxiety, and palpitations) of decreased blood sugar or a failure of the warning signs to occur before development of neuroglycopenia, which means a shortage of glucose in the brain. Curiously, this term was not coined for diabetes until 10 years after the introduction of genetically modified human synthetic insulin and insulin analogues.

I hate to say it but diabetes is a crapshoot. You never know what you are going to get, but you can sure try your best to keep your eye on the ball. Removing the inherent dangers of hypoglycemic unawareness would make me a happier diabetic, and improve the lives of all those I care about (diabetics like myself). The answer might lie in the only type of treatment available nowadays, insulin analogues. Diabetics who do not take any form of drug to control blood sugar do NOT have hypoglycemic unawareness.

It's called human but it is nothing like natural human insulin. It may be faster acting or longer lasting but I'm sure He didn't intend for insulin to break sound barriers or last three moons. If Big Pharmaceutical companies were asked to compare insulin analogues with natural human insulin you'd hear crickets. I promise you NO Big Pharma will fund a study that would become the antithesis of their marketing campaigns, human insulin is better. It's not better, it's just different -- totally different! Natural insulin is fat-loving. Insulin analogues are water-loving. The global command center of the body (the brain) is one big blob of fatty material. This means as your blood sugar is dropping, your brain is last fed, if it eats at all. Here in the United States we are victims of circumstance in hypoglycemic unawareness. Sorry brain, no soup for you.