Choosing Your Diabetes Health Care Team

Being diagnosed with diabetes can be very frightening. When your doctor or health practitioner does not give you much information, this feeling can be intensified. Here are some tips on finding the health care team you will need after being diagnosed. Hopefully, this will help you get through the first few months after your diagnosis.

It is much easier to manage diabetes with the right health care team. Your team may include a diabetes doctor, a nurse, a dietitian, an exercise physiologist, a mental health professional, an eye doctor, a foot doctor, a dentist, a pharmacist, and you. This group of professionals will teach you about the care of your condition. For the teamwork to actually succeed you will have to be sure and keep your team informed as to your progress. This will include how you are implementing your plan and the effects of your efforts. For this reason, you, the patient, are the most important member of the health care team.

If there is a nurse in your team, they can teach you many things. In addition to teaching you about the disease of diabetes this professional can also teach you about the medicine you will be taking, how to give yourself shots if needed, how to monitor your condition, what to look for if your glucose goes high or low, how to take care of yourself if you get a common illness, and how to keep healthy if you get pregnant. If someone on your team has the initials RN or MSN then this person is a nurse. They can be a diabetes nurse practitioner, a nurse clinician, or a nurse educator.

When you see the letters CDE after a person's name, this is telling you that they are a Certified Diabetes Educator. This person is trained to educate you about your disease. They can help you learn how to keep your blood glucose under control. They usually keep up with any new treatments and most times they also will know about natural remedies that can be used. They will help you monitor your progress in blood glucose control and also the side effects that can often happen when a person has diabetes.