Post by papihoyos on Feb 24, 2015 22:15:19 GMT -5
Here is a link to a thread on Diabetes Daily that I have participated in.
www.diabetesdaily.com/forum/multiple-daily-injections-mdi/82173-afrezza/
The first is about the lungs. Smoking does not cause cancer; tobacco does. Chewing tobacco also causes cancer of the mouth, but this does not suggest anything about what else we should put in our mouths. And who would inject tobacco or any other foreign substance under the skin?
Which brings up the next point. The lungs are seen as a pristine sanctuary that should only be exposed to the purest air, while injecting something under the skin is no big deal. This is exactly backwards. SC injections introduce foreign substances into a sterile part of the body that is not designed to encounter the outside world. Who would use a dirty needle? Our lungs encounter the entire outside world, even in the most purely natural environment, from dust and pollen to bacteria, to anything we slurp down our throats, and everything we smell. The healthy lungs support huge and diverse colonies of bacteria. One poster brought up coal miners (many of whom smoke.) Imagine for a minute how much coal dust they inhale in a year. Injecting that dust subcutaneously probably would not be a good idea either.
The second misconception is that insulin acts on glucose, so insulin doses are proportional to reductions in blood glucose. Insulin does not act on glucose, but rather enables the cells to metabolize glucose. This means that while insulin doses are sometimes proportional to reductions in blood glucose levels, this is not always the case, much in the way that more catalyst in a chemical reaction will not always have a proportional effect or any effect. I think my restaurant analogy is actually more accurate than the catalyst example. What is interesting is that many poster on the thread you cite relate the experience of injecting insulin without then getting the expected glucose lowering results. They have seen in real life that insulin dosage is not directly proportional to glucose reduction, but cannot imagine that this fact could be used to advantage in diabetes treatment.
The main point here is that it is often underlying assumptions that lead the discussion astray. Sometimes the false assumption is so subtle or seemingly so innocuous as to go unnoticed.
Addendum: I cannot resist adding an example of another of my favorite rants about those underlying assumptions and the harm they can do. Dietary cholesterol should be avoided because blood serum cholesterol is bad. The assumption that dietary cholesterol is related to cholesterol in the blood is as easy to gloss over as it is obviously false. The dietary recommendations this idea spawned probably hastened the deaths of millions. The obvious logical fallacy of the idea was pointed out by Henry David Thoreau almost 200 years ago.
“One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
To the same point those oxen eat only vegetable matter and no cholesterol, yet their muscles and blood are full of cholesterol. Who could imagine that a simple logical fallacy combined with a strong dose of good intentions could kill millions?