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The difference between Types I and II
Type I diabetes is insulin-dependent diabetes and type II diabetes is insulin-resistant diabetes. Sometimes kids have a hard time understanding the difference between the two. For younger children, I often explain it this way: with type I diabetes, your pancreas just wakes up one day and decides “Well, I’m not going to work anymore, and that’s that.” So your body becomes dependent on this insulin and the way that we need to give you insulin is through injections. Type II is a little bit different. Type II is predominantly a lifestyle based illness. With type II diabetes, your pancreas just gets really, really tired. It doesn’t necessarily stop working, but whatever insulin is being produced is just not working right for your body. That is why you have to take either pills or you may need to have insulin injections.
-Jennifer Rein, LICSW,
Licensed Social Worker, Diabetes Program
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The rise of diabetes type II
I think this is a natural disaster of proportions so major that we now are seeing it being echoed around the world as people eat more like us, or more of our food. Who would have thought that it would be a plague in India, where historically people of a nation like India could not have had this problem because of its economic and nutritional situation? Within our own country, diabetes type II is not limited anymore to the people who were considered to be high risk, like the Native American, African-American and Chicano populations. Imagine what the rates of diabetes II will be like in a few years since 72 million Americans are now obese. When I was an Endocrinology Fellow in the mid-1970s, we saw 2-3 newly diagnosed Type II Diabetes patients a year. We now see that many each week and have a special clinic for them. The thing is that this is all preventable. It’s all preventable.
-Norman Spack, MD,
Physician, Diabetes Program
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