Diabetes
What are prediabetes and diabetes?
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that 100 million Americans have either diabetes or prediabetes. For those of you counting, that’s 1 in 3 American adults!
A prediabetes diagnosis is a warning sign: Your blood glucose levels are rising, and you’re developing insulin resistance, but you don’t yet have diabetes.
Diabetes is a dysfunction in the way the body processes glucose and insulin, causing glucose levels to stay consistently high. People’s bodies with type 1 diabetes don’t produce insulin while those with type 2 diabetes don’t produce enough insulin or process it correctly.
What are the dangers of diabetes?
When too much glucose circulates in your system for extended periods, it can lead to:
- Nerve damage
- Vision damage
- Heart disease
- Peripheral vascular disease
- Kidney failure
- Decreased immunity
- Amputation
Thankfully, if you do have prediabetes, treatment is available to help you avoid diabetes and regulate blood sugar levels.
How do you treat prediabetes and diabetes?
We utilize a holistic functional medicine approach to treatment that emphasizes addressing root causes (we like to call it “root cause resolution”). Whether you are at the prediabetes or diabetes stage, we can help you avoid the progression of diabetes with healthy lifestyle changes including:
- Exercise
- Healthy diet
- Supplements
- Smoking cessation
- Weight loss
To make these recommendations, we start with an initial evaluation where we take a detailed medical history and learn about your goals. We then order lab tests relevant to what we learn during the evaluation. While waiting for those results, we’ll provide some dietary changes you can implement right away. Once those results come back, we’ll get to work on a treatment plan.
At every step of the way, you will be supported by a whole team, including a dedicated health coach, to make sure that you are able to implement all of the lifestyle changes so that the solution will be permanent. Many of our patients report that the education and support they received made a huge difference in allowing them to successfully reverse their diabetes and prediabetes, and get their energy and vitality back.
What are the benefits of functional medicine treatment for diabetes and prediabetes?
Functional medicine is about addressing diabetes at the root rather than just resorting to medications that mask symptoms. This approach empowers you to treat high blood sugar and insulin resistance naturally to prevent prediabetes from turning into diabetes and reverse the condition if you already are a diabetic.
We have a very high success rate at helping our patients with these conditions, but because of our high-touch approach, we can only take a limited number of patients. To assess whether our approach is right for you, we always schedule a one-hour diabetes consultation.
If you’re interested in taking a proactive, whole-body approach to diabetes, contact Family Acupuncture & Wellness online or over the phone.
