Type II Diabetics QOL Study

Thank you to Ryan Pederson, ex-pres, for forwarding this on. I'm a little late in posting it, and I apologize for that.

This is an absolutely fascinating article discussing the quality of life for diabetics patients. I couldn't find the actual article online (stupid journal limited access....ggrrrrr) but here's the abstract on it.



The gist of the article is this: Patients diagnosed with Type II diabetes would rather deal with the complications of the disease itself i.e. kidney issues, increased risk of cardiovascular death, blindness, loss of limbs etc. in exchange for not having to take all the pills to lower blood glucose, diet and exercise, insulin, and deal with the inconvenience and cost of dealing with their diabetes now.



I think the quote by the lead author Dr. Elbert Huang, assistant professor at the University of Chicago makes many good points:



"The people who care for patients with a chronic disease like diabetes think about that disease and about preventing long-term complications. The people who have a chronic disease think about their immediate lives, which include the day-to-day costs and inconvenience of a multi-drug regimen. The consequences are often poor compliance, which means long-term complications, which will then require more medications."



I think his statement raises many, many questions. How do we as pharmacists approach our treatment? We look at it as a correct answer-Patient has disease X, we treat with drug Y. Next question/patient. Real life, or so I am told since I'm just a student, is a bit more complicated. How will the patient respond, how do we respond, is this what the patient wants, etc. And all of this then deals with compliance, which is of course a huge concern because (and this may come as a surprise to many of you) if you don't take a drug, it doesn't actually work.

I was also very surprised by this for a moment, but then after some thinking about it, I realized that a patient that has had poor diet and minimal exercise-a lifestyle stereotypical of many Type II diabetics-probably won't really like trying to jump through all of the hoops necessary to turn around their lifestyle of poor health.

Other ideas that I won't address since this is already meandering and verbose-but what about the burden on health care for their end-of-life care, how do we then treat patients that aren't complying, and are we simply enabling their poor health by not chastizing them on their lack of compliance