When I talked with Delta, her Certified Diabetes Educator, Virginia Valentine, was also on the line. Virginia tells me that she herself has type 2 diabetes and has lost “a little over 40 pounds” since starting on Byetta.

Virginia plans to be available at all 10 roadshow events to give people access to a diabetes educator. “Fewer than one-fourth of the people with diabetes have ever seen one,” she says.

Delta chipped in. She exclaimed that before she met Virginia, “I didn’t even know that diabetes educators existed!”

But it was Jamaison Schuler, Lilly’s senior communications associate, who came in for my toughest questioning on the conference call with Delta and Virginia. “I have been disturbed by your lack of publicity for Byetta,” I told him.

“We wanted to make sure that because Byetta is different from all of the other diabetes therapies that we took an appropriate amount of time to educate physicians, nurse educators, and even endocrinologists, so they would know how to prescribe it well before so we really started going out there to consumers,” he responded evenly. “We didn’t want them to go in and ask for it and the doctors didn’t understand it. So we took our time.”

I sympathize somewhat with that approach. In fact, as I told him and have written here, I had to fire the primary care physician that I had when I decided to start on Byetta myself.

But, now, Jamaison tells me, about half of the primary care physicians in this country have prescribed Byetta. More than 85 percent of diabetes specialists have prescribed it. Non-specialists have written almost three out of four prescriptions for it.

Does your doctor know about Byetta? If not, he or she needs to get with the program. Or you need to reach out to one who is up-to-date.