James Hirsch, a type 1 diabetic, agonized when his three-year-old son started showing the symptoms of diabetes. His agony took the form of remarkable brilliance in his book, Cheating Destiny: Living With Diabetes, America's Biggest Epidemic. The book portrays diabetes from the perspective of someone living with the disease. He explains how diabetes is treated in this country, the shortfalls in the governance, both economically and physiologically.

Hirsch, a former reporter for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal asks the editor of a hugely popular web site about the quality of care for diabetes in this country. The response he received: "It stinks." Hirsch details the physical complications that arise from diabetes and health insurance companies' reluctance to fully reimburse relatively low-cost education programs. These programs are designed to prevent the high-cost diagnostic testing and hospital care resulting from diabetes complications. Makes you wonder if it's unintuitive bureaucracy or intuitive capitalistic malfeasance. Don't be silly -- it's nothing personal, it's just business.

Being a person with diabetes is never simple. Hirsch explains, "insulin and food, food and insulin. I imagine them like armies in the night, battling inside a diabetic's body,"..."the battles never produce a winner. The armies simply live to fight another day." Fight the good fight, James. Thank you for sharing your perspective with remarkable brilliance and enlightening reality.

The frequent visits of many diabetes patients to the Peterborough City hospital emergency room in the UK is putting a severe strain on the smooth operation of emergency care facilities. According to an online report, too many people are turning up at the emergency room expecting treatment for relatively minor ailments. Health professionals are pleading with the public to manage long-term conditions like diabetes properly - at home - so that emergency room visits would not be necessary. Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine a story like this making it into the news in the US. Chronic lack of access to proper care means that countless Americans rely on emergency room visits for care in just the way described in this article. What is to be done about uninsured diabetics in the US who get no regular care elsewhere?