Medical Breakthrough '08: 24/7 Blood Sugar Test

Testing your blood sugar may soon be as convenient as checking the time.

• Breakthroughs
• Your Medical Care
• Diabetes
• Mind & Body

Diabetics may be able to say buh-bye to finger-pricking when checking blood sugar. New monitors, like the one being developed by Gerard Cote at Texas A&M, require no blood and offer more certainty. In Cote's model, a sheath of tiny fluorescent particles, smaller than a strand of human hair, is inserted into a diabetic patient's wrist. The sheath is invisible, but when you shine a small laser on it, it glows and changes colors in response to deviations in blood sugar. A wristwatch-like device provides a digital readout of glucose levels and alerts the person to dangerous dips or spikes. Houston-based BioTex is also developing a model using similar technology. 5 years

From Reader's Digest - March 2008

 

• Medical Breakthroughs for 2008
• New hope for cancer, diabetes, dementia and more.
• 
• Why Blood Sugar Matters
• It's no longer just certain people who need to worry about their blood sugar; it's pretty much everyone.
• 
• Sex and Diabetes
• What you should know about sex when you have diabetes.
• 
• Detecting Diabetes Earlier
• A new test targets risk before disease develops.
• 
• Natural Solutions for Diabetes
• 
• Raw Food Diet -- Extremely Healthy or Just Extreme?
• The newest trend in eating is a raw food only diet. How healthy is it?
• 
• 25 Foods for Better Blood Sugar
• Insulin resistance is reversible -- if eating the wrong foods can cause it, eating the right ones can cure it. Add just one of these to your plate to begin feeling better and staving off killer diseases right away.
• 

The philosophy professor teaching a course my friend was taking warned the class he was going to give them a test. When the day came he entered the classroom, wordlessly placed his chair on the table and, turning to the blackboard, wrote, "Prove to me this chair does not exist."

Most of the nervous students began intently scribbling out long dissertations. But one member of the class wrote down just two words, and then handed his paper to the teacher. The professor had to smile when he read the student's answer: "What chair?"

-- Prospero A. Flores