diabetic retinopathy

I have spent years taking care of patients with diabetes, and one of the things we routinely discuss is their diabetic eye examination.

Have you seen the ophthalmologist? When was your last retinal exam? Do you already have diabetic retinopathy? Because uncontrolled diabetes can damage the small blood vessels in the retina.

So imagine the confusion when a patient who already has a disease capable of damaging their eyesight reads, Osempi causes blindness.

Now we need to determine what we are actually talking about.

They are not the same thing.

So let's move into the science because this is one of those situations where understanding a little bit of anatomy immediately makes the headline less frightening.

Okay, let's start with diabetic retinopathy.

The retina is the light-sensitive tissue at the back of your eye.

If you're eating a diet that doesn't contain a lot of omega-3 fatty acids, or if you're eating a diet that has adequate omega-3 fatty acids, but it's far, far too high in omega-6 fatty acids, you're at increased risk of developing glaucoma.

And now the number one preventable cause of blindness in human beings is diabetic retinopathy.

Yeah, literally thousands of ophthalmologists are kept in business every day, taking care of people who have had prediabetes for decades and they didn't know it, had undiagnosed diabetes for years and didn't know it.

And that damage is being done each day to the tiny arteries and arterioles that feed your retina, and eventually you start to develop edema, you start to develop new blood vessel growth.

All of these people have some degree of hyperinsulinemia.

Now, since insulin, one of its many, many functions is it functions as a sort of growth hormone.

it makes perfect sense that having chronically high levels of insulin could lead to all of the causes and symptoms of diabetic retinopathy.

So diabetic retinopathy shouldn't even be a thing because if everyone took charge of their diet, ate a very low carbohydrate diet that did not contain sugars and grains and vegetable oils, There would be 10 cases of diabetic retinopathy in the entire United States.

Absolutely.

Retinopathy can affect the eyes.

People who've got diabetes, it's out of control, can end up in neuropathy.

They can end up having ulcers, poor circulation, and even... amputations so it's something you've got to treat seriously and if he's doing all the correct way of testing that and if it's not then he needs some instruction from the doctor but as I said wash and dry the hands thoroughly and repeat the test but he mentioned he's done the test quite a few times and it's coming down slowly it's got down to 10 Look, that definitely needs to be discussed.