Pleased to Meet You, MyDiabetesCentral Community!

I'm Allie Beatty. You may know me from my blogging on AOL for TheDiabetesBlog.com or you may know me from my YouTube channel. I also frequent Yahoo Answers and TuDiabetes.com. Yes - I've been around the DOC (diabetes online community) a few times. If this is our first time meeting - I am pleased to meet you here on MyDiabetesCentral.com.

To give you a short intro - I'm that girl that thinks most "diabetes news" is nothing more than a Big Pharma advertisement. I was diagnosed in 1985 - shortly aftger Humulin (synthetic human insulin) was introduced. I had a very difficult time with diabetes as a child and as an adolescent. Controlling diabetes led to frequent lows, blurry vision, loss of concentration and overall misery. My reaction to the treatment of my newly diagnosed diabetes was a mind-blowing, medical enigma. Child doesn't make insulin. Blood sugar is deadly high. Child cannot take ‘insulin'. What goes on?  

Doctors could not comprehend why I was so reluctant to use the rDNA analogues. As I became an adult and began reaching out on different scientific and medical forums - I was contacted by researchers who were involved in the development of synthetic human insulin. What they told me shocked me!

First a little background. If you are one of the millions of people diagnosed with autoimmune (Type I) or LADA (Type 1.5) diabetes your loss of beta cell function may be due to an allergic reaction to human insulin. The research came from  Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Disease published in 2007. The 20 years my family spent helplessly witnessing my battle with Type I diabetes made perfect sense! If my type of diabetes was due to an allergy from synthetic human insulin - why would you treat this allergic reaction with the synthetic form of what caused it? Do doctors treat a peanut allergy with peanut butter?

And so my crusade began. The news I was reporting, day-in and day-out, on AOL was a daily reiteration of how Big Pharma marketing. Marketing dollars and Big Pharma money spur these stories into the news - very little science backs the stories. A lot of these new drugs focus on quickly lowering glucose levels despite the resulting complication rate in diabetes increasing. Even the FDA is now hip to the games of Big Pharma. They have recently changed the required testing to prove safety of new diabetes drug. Does this impair you - the consumer? 

I am the consumer. Had my parents been given a choice 23 years ago - my life could have been profoundly different. I want to ensure that the choice is available, once again, to newly diagnosed patients with Type I and Type 1.5 diabetes.

Choice and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. The power of free will rests in the power of choice. Big Pharmaceutical companies decided to remove that choice from the diabetes marketplace. In doing so - those who have diabetes due to an allergy of human insulin are no longer provided a potentially safer option in their treatment options.