There’s been talk among us off and on about monitoring. Very Old, Very Healthy Diabetic posed the same question last June. Why don’t type 2’s monitor blood sugar more?

At the time, I ranted, “The number one reason, in my most humble opinion, that type 2s don’t test more is we are told by our doctors we only need to test daily. Or every other day, even. I’m told that there’s not much of a risk of going low (unless I’m exercising tight control) by my doctors so I don’t need to test. I don’t need to know how I react to different foods. I don’t need to know how my blood sugar trends. [...] If the doctors don’t take it seriously how hard is it for us to take it seriously?”

A study in the British Medical Journal not surprisingly found that people with type 2 “tended not to be influenced by their readings’ results – probably because they had not been told what to do.”

Therefore, Dr. Elizabeth Peel and team spoke to 18 newly diagnosed diabetes type 2 patients over a period of four years. The aim was to find out what they thought about self-monitoring over that period.

Unsurprisingly, they found that as time went by the self monitoring was either discontinued or happened less regularly. Some of the participants were not too sure how to interpret the test results and what to do about them, while others said they found it reassuring. A consistent problem was what to do about high readings.

The majority of the participants wondered whether health professionals placed a high value on their readings, saying that doctors seemed little interested in their self-monitored test results after the initial phase. Some patients regarded this as a sign that self-monitoring was either pointless or unimportant. A number of them continued self-monitoring because they themselves wanted to, even though doctors seemed to give the impression that it did not matter.

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