What happens when someone without diabetes starts sporting a diabetes device, and describes the know more like having a new toy, sort o than a life-rescue medical product?

The Diabetes Online Residential area gets mad, apparently.

That's what happened recently when Occupation Insider journalist Lydia Ramsey proven KO'd a Dexcom G6 CGM (continuous glucose monitor) to track her glucose levels for a few weeks. In her mid-November article, the 26-yr-old New Yorker who does non live with diabetes clearly points out that she isn't "the intended substance abuser of a CGM," but for years she's been interested in trying one out for herself. To practice this, she obtained two G6 sensors to try out for 20 years "in the promise that it would help me find oneself shipway to boost my operation and energy through changes to my diet and exercise."

Across social media, people touched aside diabetes were not pleased. Many slammed Ramsey's piece as existence shallow, tone-deaf, and disrespectful to the struggles that PWDs (people with diabetes) chee on a daily basis.

But the theme that CGM devices will soon become more mainstream gadgets, on a regular basis used by people without diabetes, is not new. Some CGM makers, including industry leader Dexcom, have been quite vocal about this.

It may even Be a matter of survival for manufacturers, given that global stats show CGM usage at just 25% to 30% of the roughly 25 million people in the US with type 1 diabetes, at best. Like a sho that pharmacies are start to stock CGM supplies, and lower-cost, fully-disposal models are in the kit and caboodle, we English hawthorn Be nearing that carrefour when CGM is not just for people with diabetes.

Coincidently, Ramsey's article published just prior to the Thanksgiving vacation weekend, when Dexcom experienced a "server overload" that shut down its data-sharing functions for 48+ hours. Many users were up in weaponry over this second #DexcomOutage pursuing a similar incident complete the Sunrise Year's 2019 holiday. These outages principal to concerns about how the company could possibly meet hugely enlarged consumer postulate, going forward.

In Ramsey's account statement of her experience using the Dexcom G6, she describes both routine workdays around Empire State and also training for and competitive in the NYC Marathon, which she ran with her dad. While Ramsey isn't "one of United States of America" with diabetes, she has a T1D co-worker at Business sector Insider and has been covering diabetes – the insulin pricing crisis, specifically – for the historical few years.

Our team at the 'Mine had our share of eye rolls reading her CGM piece, peculiarly the way she describes her post-milkshake blood sugar as "boring" and "non as cool as I thought" when seeing that PWD-coveted straight trend channel. She also describes her "disappointment" when gummy candy didn't spike her BGs during an 11-mile run, and makes reference to herself as "Bionic Lydia" in texts with friends.

Understandably, some folk were worried that Ramsey's "superficial" regar makes CGM seem like yet another ecumenical health and fitness "toy with" that insurers would have little incentive to address. That is the last viewpoint PWDs would want propagated.

Yet there is more or less valuable insight in Ramsey's piece worth noting for the broader non-diabetes universe prying active CGM tech and how information technology mightiness constitute useful in their general health tracking efforts:

  • Food and exercise effects vary: Even though her BG levels were not as volatile as those of us with diabetes, Ramsey was competent to observe the impact of antithetic foods — and got to experience our everyday reality that effects often vary symmetric with the same foods. Same goes with exercise; during her endurance contest training and competing, her BG levels didn't just drop but sometimes went up.
  • Sleep patterns: Ramsey observed that her glucose levels would rear slightly just before make out, and then spike about 3am — what many of us in the diabetes world know as "Dawn Phenomenon."
  • Alcohol (beer specifically): She prospective her stemma sugars to rise when drinking a adenoidal-carb brewage, but to her surprise discovered information technology actually lowered her glucose. This is besides sometimes the case for those of us with type 1 diabetes.
  • Energy slumps not correlated to glucose: Ramsey writes, "Turns out, the body is more complicated than I had initially thought. Blood clams levels don't exactly correlate to energy levels. There are other factors, look-alike caffein intake, hormones, how well I slept the night before, how hydrous I am, and general feelings of procrastination, that could contribute to my afternoon drop-off. And justified in cases when my blood glucose stays low, like spell lengthways long distances, it doesn't mean I'm extinct of fire."

Ramsey also delves into two psychosocial aspects of wearing a diabetes twist that more in our residential area know all too substantially:

  • That people verboten in public by and large don't know what a CGM is, and that sometimes people even biff at IT happening our bodies believing it's some new type of sports tracker like a Fitbit.
  • Location matters, in terms of finding the right spots along the personify to wear the device. She learned that the struggle is real, when information technology comes to worrying about snagging a CGM sensor on clothing, seatbelts or early objects.

Ramsey summarizes her CGM trial by stating that while her BG fluctuations were in fact minimal, "I still learned a lot about my body, and by the end, I was bummed I had to take it off."

In her article, Ramsey notes: "For technical school workers pickings a DIY approach to biology, CGMs offer a way to quantify the results of their at-home experiments around fasting, recitation, stress, and sleep." She links to another Stage business Insider article from January 2017 in which non-diabetic Embayment Area biohackers wore CGMs bu to study the uses of such medtech devices.

Naturally there are those who have tried eating away a CGM or insulin pump out of empathy, as a way to wagerer infer what their child or some other PWDs in their lives may be experiencing. This includes some health care providers, for instance Lily Nichols, a registered nurse and CDE who does not have diabetes but rumored about the experience of trying the device organism prescribed to patients in a quite a informative web log post.

Some of US have shaken our heads over these practices, because we know IT's not the same thing atomic number 3 organism truly dependent on a CGM or insulin pump; they aren't in reality navigating wild blood line sugar swings, never-ending carb calculations nor the psychosocial challenges involved with wearing checkup technology 24/7. Merely perhaps one can still appreciate their efforts to clear discernment…?

Just about the diabetes online community, Ramsey's piece drew widespread criticism.

  • Australian D-advocate and blogger Renza Scibilia describes this phenom As "playing pretend" on diabetes and criticizes those – HCPs, particularly – WHO do this. She's written about that in front in a post titled "Wherefore do diabetes when you don't have diabetes?" and a followup post where she revisited that question.
  • Longtime T1 PWD and advocate Kerri Sparling shared this nigh Ramsey's writeup: "This clause makes me really excited. People with diabetes struggle to access CGMs (among other things)."
  • T2D advocate Mila Clarke Buckley says, "This would hold been better if she would have close it with why they're advantageous for someone with diabetes, and how it helps our daily decisions. It just seems frivolous, and kinda misses the point of what a CGM fanny do for mortal's lineament of life."
  • Fellow type 1 Microphone Parise adds this, "It just bothers Pine Tree State that the writer of the article was able to get her hands on one when so many diabetics don't sustain the opportunity to have it (for whatever reason). It just came across as 'Oh, look at this cool thing and I wear't need it but Lashkar-e-Taiba ME see what a beigel and Marathon does to my perfect blood sugar.' And then, 'I'm so tragicomic to fall behind information technology.' I bang that an article comparable that is best publicity for an awe-inspiring tool for us. But as I mention, something really bothered me about it."

Others divided concerns about whether Dexcom would even make up competent keep up with broad consumer demand, since the CA company has been troubled to meet PWD take up to now, or how insurers power interpret consumer demand as a sign that CGMs are a "luxury" item.

Non all saw red, though.

From England, two DOCer's shared different perspectives:

  • @DiabetesDadUK renowned: "I understand the anger towards the CGM-victimization journalist. We all want the best tech and meds. Not everybody can afford them. I ground the graph gripping and how the BG of a person without diabetes reacts. The deflated lines that we chase as T1Ds are unrealistic & deliberate."
  • @Kaylabetes wrote: "An interesting read. Doesn't gain ME angry. Pretty good factual info Ra: use of CGM."

Patc Ramsey's "mainstream" CGM recap Crataegus oxycantha raise some hackles in the diabetes community, we have to remember that's not who this article was scripted for. Business Insiders' intended audience is a much broader swath of people WHO follow the expanding securities industry for a variety of medical sensors to help consumers tag their total health.

And when reading our community's nonrational responses, we couldn't help simply reflect on the incoherent lines that be betwixt the corking, bad, and ugly of diabetes: Execute we PWDs compliments to follow seen as "sick" Beaver State non? On the nonpareil hand, there are and then many inspirational stories of Olympic athletes with diabetes and those who can do anything. But on the other hand, umpteen PWDs suffer debilitating complications, and lack to be established for their struggles. How is the general public supposed to reconcile those two faces of diabetes?

It's a tricky reconciliation act, for sure.

Ramsey wraps ascending her article by noting: "I'll embody curious if there's a world in which glucose monitoring becomes more popular among populate without diabetes."

It definitely seems like that's where we're headed. We receive to believe that as CGM (or any diabetes tech) becomes more mainstream, IT will become more accessible and affordable to the masses, including galore more PWDs.

And that seems like something we can all hang back — despite the emotions we may take up about not-diabetes folk being advantaged and superficial, surgery not using a particular device in the same life-decisive way that we do.

Mike Hoskins has lived with type 1 diabetes since age 5. As managing editor at DiabetesMine, he has two decades of experience in black and white and online journalism, and is an active voice patient counsellor in the Diabetes Community. Helium lives in Southeast Chicago with his wife and their black lab, Riley (his editorial subordinate!).