In the interview with GP Iris Wichers (Doing something for the climate through the doctor7/11) I saw under the heading „medicines […] against diseases related to lifestyle” a common but careless use of the term ‘diabetes’. You don’t expect that from a doctor.
There are two types of diabetes, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 is the least common (about 110,000 patients), and type 2 is the most common (about 1 million; figures from NIVEL, 2020). Type 1 is an autoimmune disease that has nothing to do with lifestyle. Very young children and even babies can get type 1. Type 2 has much more to do with lifestyle. The phrase “diabetes medicines” in the relevant text is therefore confusing, especially when Wichers says “that keeps me very busy.” You don’t have to worry about that for a type 1 diabetes patient: without insulin, the patient will soon die, and the damage that this type of diabetes inadvertently inflicts on the arteries is limited by, for example, cholesterol-lowering drugs.
Let no one just talk about ‘diabetes’, it creates confusion and suggests that the patients with type 1 are partly to blame for their disease.
Harlingen
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 9, 2022