Oct 5, 2026 · 37 min · 10 segments
In this Mailbag episode of Healthful Woman, Dr. Nathan Fox answers listener questions about gestational diabetes and continuous glucose monitors, umbilical cord edema, fetal movement with an anterior…
Welcome to our 38th Mailbag Podcast, What Does the Fox Say? Our first question is from an anonymous listener.
Can you discuss the use of continuous glucose monitoring, or CGM, for pregnant women with gestational diabetes? I have a history of gestational diabetes and would love to avoid months of finger sticks if I have another pregnancy.
It seems like CGM would provide a lot of useful information for me since I tend to eat snacks and small meals throughout the day.
What are the pros and cons of CGM? And how does your practice use CGM in your patients? All right, really interesting topic.
So as some background, for someone with gestational diabetes, or frankly, any moment diabetes, one of the things that is necessary to figure out about food and blood glucose and insulin and treatments, all these things is what is the person's blood glucose level.
And if you want to know what it is sort of instantaneously, meaning at this moment, traditionally the way we would do it is by what we call a finger stick, which is basically like a little device where you prick the tip of your finger, a little drop of blood comes off.
You put that onto a little strip of paper, which goes into a handheld monitor and it gives you a number, it gives you a value.
And that is the traditional way that people would check their blood glucose and how often you had to do it depends on what type of diabetes you have, whether you're on medication, whether you're not on medication.
And traditionally, for gestational diabetes, for someone who has it in pregnancy, we would recommend doing that, the finger stick, four times a day.
The first one, you would do what we call fasting, which is basically when you wake up in the morning, you haven't eaten for the past whatever amount of hours, we call it a fasting.
And then you'll do it after breakfast, after lunch, and after dinner, usually an hour or two hours.
Different people do it differently, but basically after the three meals, and that gets to four times a day.
And using those values, you determine how is the gestational diabetes controlled? Do we need to change the diet? Do we need to start medication? If you're on medication, do we need to change the dose of medication? That's what we would do.
A continuous glucose monitor, for those who do not know, is basically a little device that that attaches to your body.
And essentially it has a little needle that goes into the skin and it's a sensor and it stays there.
Welcome to our 38th Mailbag Podcast, What Does the Fox Say? Our first question is from an anonymous listener.
Can you discuss the use of continuous glucose monitoring, or CGM, for pregnant women with gestational diabetes? I have a history of gestational diabetes and would love to avoid months of finger sticks if I have another pregnancy.
It seems like CGM would provide a lot of useful information for me since I tend to eat snacks and small meals throughout the day.
What are the pros and cons of CGM? And how does your practice use CGM in your patients? All right, really interesting topic.
So as some background, for someone with gestational diabetes, or frankly, any moment diabetes, one of the things that is necessary to figure out about food and blood glucose and insulin and treatments, all these things is what is the person's blood glucose level.
And if you want to know what it is sort of instantaneously, meaning at this moment, traditionally the way we would do it is by what we call a finger stick, which is basically like a little device where you prick the tip of your finger, a little drop of blood comes off.
You put that onto a little strip of paper, which goes into a handheld monitor and it gives you a number, it gives you a value.
And that is the traditional way that people would check their blood glucose and how often you had to do it depends on what type of diabetes you have, whether you're on medication, whether you're not on medication.
And traditionally, for gestational diabetes, for someone who has it in pregnancy, we would recommend doing that, the finger stick, four times a day.
The first one, you would do what we call fasting, which is basically when you wake up in the morning, you haven't eaten for the past whatever amount of hours, we call it a fasting.
And then you'll do it after breakfast, after lunch, and after dinner, usually an hour or two hours.
Different people do it differently, but basically after the three meals, and that gets to four times a day.
And using those values, you determine how is the gestational diabetes controlled? Do we need to change the diet? Do we need to start medication? If you're on medication, do we need to change the dose of medication? That's what we would do.
A continuous glucose monitor, for those who do not know, is basically a little device that that attaches to your body.
And essentially it has a little needle that goes into the skin and it's a sensor and it stays there.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.