Showdown with Diabetes
Author: Deb Butterfield
A compelling personal account of living with diabetes from diagnosis to cure, with a comprehensive overview of the latest advances in treatment. Deb Butterfield was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of ten, in the days before blood glucose monitors. In Showdown with Diabetes she writes about the world of diabetes from within that world, telling the story of her life with diabetes, through progressive debilitation, until she was finally freed of restrictions and needles with a pancreas transplant. If you have diabetes this book will help you to know your options. For the families of people with diabetes and the medical professionals who care for them, it also offers a rare and frank insight into the life of a diabetic person beyond the day-to-day physical management of the disease. Going further than the clinical language of blood tests, diets, and insulin regimens, it shows diabetes as a force that molds a person's personality and profoundly shapes his or her life. Most important, Showdown with Diabetes is the first book about this disease to embrace the era of cures, and to urge its readers to reach beyond short-term coping strategies to find long-term solutions.
Publishers Weekly
Calling for a fundamental shift in the way diabetes is viewed, Butterfield, founder and director of the Insulin-Free World Federation, combines the story of her own harrowing personal battle with a critical look at the limitations of standard approaches and a review of the latest advances. Diagnosed in 1970 when she was only 10, she began to experience secondary complications when she was in her early 20s, despite her best efforts at managing her diabetes. The progression was steady: retinopathy, then neuropathy, which led to major problems in walking, and then kidney disease. In 1993, with her condition worsening, she underwent a kidney-pancreas transplant in hopes that the new pancreas would produce insulin. Although the procedure has a high success rate, her body rejected the new organs. A year later, however, a retransplant was successful, and since then Butterfield has been living a virtually normal existence, taking only small daily doses of immunosuppressives. Her mission now, spelled out in part two, is to disseminate information about therapeutic options and about the research into transplanting insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells that may one day provide a cure for diabetes. With diabetes treatments accounting for one in four Medicare dollars, her message is one for policy makers as well as for diabetics. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Butterfield was diagnosed with diabetes at age 10; at age 34 she received a successful pancreas/kidney transplant, and was cured of the disease. Five years later, Butterfield takes only small daily oral doses of immunosuppressive drugs to prevent organ rejection, and she is the director of the Insulin-Free World Foundation, devoted to finding cures for diabetes. Here she first chronicles her own struggle with the disease and then offers similarly affected readers a thorough, up-to-date guide to current research and future possibilities for their own cures. Butterfield makes crystal clear from the outset that the burden of having diabetes is "grossly underestimated" by medical professionals and the general public. Butterfield rejects out of hand the standard establishment line (see Touchette, below) that careful disease management leads to healthy living. Despite her adhering religiously to her treatment regimen, "within a four-year period diabetes killed the nerves below my knees, caused bleeding in the back of my eyes, the amputation of part of a toe, a skin graft"—and that was before the kidney failure and heart attack that finally led to her transplant operation. As Butterfield points out, the focus of diabetes research has been management; her mission is to refocus onto finding cures. This is a forceful, eloquent, engrossing, and ultimately convincing argument.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by David E. R. Sutherland, M.D., Ph.D.Preface
PART 1: MY STORY
Prologue
1. London
2. School Years
3. A Healthy Diabetic
4. The First Complications
5. Small Patches of Numbness
6. Circling the Drain
7. My Broken Dream
8. The Road Back
9. Diabetes' Last Stand
10. My Cure
PART 2: AN INSULIN-FREE WORLD
Prologue
11. Birth of a Chronic Disease
12. Insulin Therapy
13. Pancreas Transplantation
14. Islet Transplantation
15. The Bird Is in Your Hands
Appendix: Pancreas and Islet
Transplant Centers
Insulin-Free World Foundation
Book review: Tom Clancys Splinter Cell 3 or Practical Guide to Clinical Data Management
Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty
Author: Helen King
When does a young girl's behaviour become a disease?
In sixteenth-century Europe, the disease of virgins, or green sickness, was seen as a common disorder affecting young unmarried girls. Its symptoms included weakness, dietary disturbance, lack of menstruation and most significantly, a change in skin colour. Understanding of the condition turned puberty and virginity into medical problems, and proposed to cure them by bloodletting, diet, exercise, and marriage.
Helen King examines the origins and history of the disease, from its roots in the classical tradition to its extraordinary survival into the 1920s, despite changes in how the mechanisms of puberty and menstruation were understood, and enormous shifts in medical theories and technologies. From menstrual disturbance to eating disorders, from liver disease to blood disorder, the disease of virgins has been adjusted throughout its history to fit medical fashions. However, little changed in the underlying ideas about the female body, and the need toregulate the sexuality of young women.
This compelling study poses a number of questions about the nature of disease itself and the relationship between illness, body image and what we should call 'normal' behavior.
No comments:
Post a Comment