Type 2 Diabetes - Why Do Many Diabetics Choose to Ignore Their Disease?

Are you living with or caring for a person with a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis who isn't taking care of themself? If can be worrisome to see someone you care about ignore their disease while their health continues to decline. To best help your family member to start paying attention to their Type 2 diabetes and any complications they may be experiencing, it can be helpful to first understand why Type 2 diabetics may choose to ignore their condition.

It can be very difficult for someone to accept they have diabetes when they're first diagnosed. There are a few different reasons...

• one possibility is the symptoms may be so minor they feel they can deal with them.
• maybe the only symptom at first is getting up at night to urinate more frequently, and it feels easier to live with this inconvenience than deal with changing their lifestyle.
• another option is the possible complications of high and unstable blood sugar, like blindness and limb amputations, are unreal or just too scary to think about.

Denying these complications altogether could be another outcome, and ignoring the disease altogether can just be easier than accepting any complications could actually affect to their body.

Finally, another reason is it could bring up memories of friends or family members who have struggled with this disease. After watching someone else trying to control their blood sugar levels for years, the newly diagnosed diabetic is familiar with the process. And the thought of going through the same process is too scary to face so, it seems simpler to think about the diagnosis sometime in the future.

As you know, it's dangerous for uncontrolled high blood sugar levels to continue to be ignored and untreated. Even if symptoms are minor at first, the extra sugar in the bloodstream is causing damage that may not show up for several years. Besides eye complications and foot problems, high blood sugar causes damage to the cardiovascular system. Almost three-fourths of people with Type 2 diabetes die of a heart attack or stroke. So, it's important to control diabetes to keep blood vessels healthy, even if the damage isn't showing right now.

So how can you help someone to stop ignoring their Type 2 diabetes diagnosis? One idea is to support your family member by making it a total family approach. Make healthy changes for the family to follow together. For example, instead of eating three large meals every day, eat three small meals with healthy snacks between meals. This will help maintain stable blood sugar levels throughout the day, and help with weight loss. Studies reveal even if the weight loss is not significant, perhaps only 5 to 7 percent of body weight, the complications of diabetes - the nerve, artery, heart, and vascular damage - can be reduced.

Although managing your disease can be very challenging, Type 2 diabetes is not a condition you must just live with. You can make simple changes to your daily routine and lower both your weight and your blood sugar levels. Hang in there, the longer you do it, the easier it gets.