Diabetes.
It can be a scary diagnosis.
For many, behaviors must change down to how you move your body and what you put into it.
But what’s perhaps even scarier is that an estimated 6 million people have diabetes and don’t even know it. Frequently, Type 2 diabetes, which is growing quickly in prevalence, develops in stages. In the early stages many people don’t notice the changes affecting their body in order to prevent the disease from taking hold.
Dr. Sherif Rizkalla recently spoke to a group of several dozen individuals as part of Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Hurst-Euless-Bedford’s Advances in Medicine lecture series. As an internal medicine physician, Dr. Rizkalla frequently treats patients’ diabetes and tries to help them navigate the complex maze of medications and lifestyle changes necessary to improve their health.
Dr. Rizkalla says that educating patients is the key to success. “You need to understand the disease process because on a day-to-day basis it is up to you, the patient, to manage diabetes yourself,” he said. “The doctor really functions as the coach.”
Some steps that individuals can take to treat or prevent diabetes is losing weight – even a 5-10% weight loss can be very effective – exercising and eating the proper diet for your individual case. For people newly diagnosed with diabetes, it’s often very effective to visit a diabetes educator for one-on-one information about the proper diet and weight loss program. Taking the medications as prescribed and monitoring blood sugars is very important to see what steps are appropriate for reaching their goals.
The bottom line, Dr. Rizkalla said, “it all comes down to self-management and personal ownership of the disease.”
For more information on diabetes or programs offered at Texas Health HEB, please visit www.diabetes.org or www.texashealth.org.
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