Type 2 diabetes is becoming an epidemic in civilized countries, with an ever-increasing trend of obesity, hypertension and other related complications like heart disease, kidney disease and peripheral neuropathy. The concern has been raised that relying on medications to lower blood sugar actually does NOT reduce the risk of death from any of the related health complications of diabetes: stroke, heart attacks, infections, and kidney disease. Is this true and if so, can you help us understand why this is so?

This, indeed, is true. Like with the whole array of autoimmune diseases and cancer, medicine is still in the dark about the true causes and must settle for finding chemicals that can mitigate bodily symptoms of various kinds, believing that is what is truly needed and that it will offer significant help. But we can state with confidence that is a false goal. Changing a laboratory result so it is now in the normal range is a self-satisfying exercise for the physician, who trains their patients in kind, to look to the lab work for guidance and feedback to show whether the treatments are working or not, when, in fact, such testing usually misses the point altogether. It is always a kind of temporary soothing of downstream consequences of the illness underway, not a primary causal influence. So, it is more a make-work project that does little to help the person's long-term health. The symptoms of diabetes are a good example. While it is certainly the case that blood sugar needs to be within a certain range, not too high or too low so as to cause serious trouble, but those are acute effects of extremes and are not the major liability taking place hurting the pancreas and often many other tissues in the body. The complex of symptoms described as type 2 diabetes with metabolic syndrome is a perfect illustration. By giving it a label and thus diagnosing a condition, all of the symptoms are then lumped together and assumed will improve with whatever helps treating signs of the disorder. While it is true that extreme high glucose levels will cause abnormal deposition of glucose taken up by cellular proteins and becoming a kind of corrupting influence, that, too, is a downstream consequence of damage due to chronic viral presence. And unless the latter is dealt with, whatever is used to regulate blood sugar levels will not stop degradation of many tissues and cells within the body due to viral infection, coupled with immune attack and its spillover in causing collateral damage of its own. The same is true of the hypertension accompanying diabetes. That is an associated symptom, not a causal factor of the condition, nor is it a cause of chronic kidney disease, heart attack, or stroke. So drug therapy with antihypertensives will help reduce extremes in blood pressure that could be frankly dangerous, but will not prevent deterioration of cells and organs by the underlying disease process, so it is a kind of Band-Aid more than a solution.