Have you ever wondered why there are no new and truly effective treatments for diabetes?
Ten years ago, I didn’t have hope that my type II diabetes could be cured at all. Sure, the doctors said new research was being done all the time and you never knew when a real breakthrough would happen, but that didn’t help me in the moment. My family and I were left without much hope. As time went on, a cure seemed farther and farther away, we accepted that the long-term consequences of being diabetic would eventually catch up to me and there was nothing we could do to change it.
But, there were hints that maybe what we had been told was wrong. First of all, I had, at least for a while, been able to stay off insulin and manage my blood sugar through diet and exercise. I had been told that it might work for a year or two if I was diligent and focused on my disease almost exclusively. It worked for more than a decade. I started to have hope that maybe I could do that forever, even though some of my symptoms started to happen,
Eventually, I noticed I was far healthier than I was supposed to be and I started to ask my doctors why. My doctors wrote it off as an anomaly or sheer dumb luck.
They told me I should just be grateful and not question it, that every year was a unique gift of longevity.
I was confused because why wouldn’t the doctors want to know why this strategy was working for me? But they were not in the least bit interested. This got me asking questions about how doctors and researchers went about dealing with new data or medical outcomes that were out of the ordinary. All I could get were promises to see if there would be any research studies that might be good. I applied to several, but I was “not a good fit.” No one ever told me why until I had a chance meeting with an internationally respected medical researcher, specializing in neuroscience for a top 5 medical college. I had been working on a medical device transaction at a conference. Medicine wasn’t my area of expertise because I was a transactional consultant for a project that involved a non-profit I was helping.
I met the researcher at the best place to find some forms of truth about life, a very nice hotel bar.
We struck up a conversation out of boredom I suppose. Just a couple of guys on the road for work. That vodka-fueled discussion helped me understand what might be going on with my medical options
After a few drinks, he told me he was traveling to promote the newest treatment for a specific disease that I had never heard of. He didn’t seem very happy to talk about it but did let me know that his trip, his speaking engagements, and the majority of his pay came from him recommending a specific treatment protocol. He confided in me that he wasn’t all that happy with the protocol, but he didn’t have much of a choice.
It turned out that he made a crazy amount of money for himself and the medical school by just making sure this protocol was widely recommended by him to doctors all across the country. He was headed to France with his wife in a few weeks, and all expenses were paid, to recommend this treatment. He admitted that it really wasn’t his protocol and that he only did a limited amount of work on it. That help was only to support the research done in-house at a pharmaceutical company.
The company’s research process was that they gave the doctors access to the company’s conclusions and he would replicate the results. The school got millions in research support, the doctor got paid in high six figures and the company had record high profits.
3 or 4 drinks in, he began to wax about what he had planned on being when he started doing medical research, but he now felt more like a street walker. To him, he had no choice but to toe the line. He had two kids in college and a wife who rather enjoyed a certain lifestyle. I asked him if that system was just for his area of practice or if it works for all medicine, like diabetes research.
He just laughed a bit and said, “Metformin isn’t the answer. I have a buddy who is diabetic so I checked for him.” He finished his drink and headed off after saying, “Research wasn’t supposed to be this way, but medicine is a business now.”
This was how I found out single patients don’t really fit the business/research model. Very few people want to or can challenge the status quo. For the most part, it just isn’t possible and that is because it’s not bad for medicine, it’s that pure innovation is bad for business.
That’s the wall we run into not just as diabetics, but any patient.
This problem is all-encompassing in the medical industry. If you have an illness, research isn’t being done to cure you, but instead to make the most profit off you and the lowest legal liability.
Our treatment is controlled by non-medical MBA thinkers. If it doesn’t make them money they must stop it. That’s how we got to where we are now in how our diabetes is being treated. It’s how we got insulin prices all the way up to $541 for a 30-day supply back in 2019 and how insulin prices stayed in the $100s until the recent $35 insulin price cap.
Metformin is the leading diabetic medicine and with a market value expected to reach over 6 billion USD, why would they stop prescribing it? But let me ask you this: have you ever heard of a diabetic on metformin who managed to cure their diabetes? Or have they only slowed the disease down?
We can fight back against the profit-driven mindset by being here for each other and sharing what our personal experiences are. By trying new ways to control and ultimately beat our type II diabetes, we can do what business does not want done: healing instead long long-term treatment.
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