Dr. Richard K. Bernstein
"I spent a month in a major insulin pump center and saw several things. Many of the female patients seemed to have wings on their sides where the pump tubing was inserted and they got lipohypertrophy from localized injections, but that was the least of it. None of them actually had remotely normal blood sugars.
Of the new patients who visit me using pumps, there was only one whom I was able to get near normal blood sugars. It was because he was still in his honeymoon period of diabetes. After a year on the pump, his blood sugar started getting unpredictable. Why? I believe it is because of the scar tissue that forms where you have a foreign body inserted for days at a time. We find that if we take people off of pumps and have them inject insulin, they cannot inject into old pump sites because they won't get predictable absorption of the insulin. They have to find new places to inject the insulin.
I assume that the reason I have never seen other pump users controlled, is because of the scar tissue that forms as a result of the pump's tubing. For some people it may take several years for the scaring to occur, but I would say that after seven years everyone who uses a pump gets scar tissue at the infusion sites."
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