Big Pharma wants to kill us to make $$$$ "How Insulin Became Unaffordable"X-Post Diabetes group

Just before Alec Raeshawn Smith turned 24, he thought he had come down with the flu. When he went to the doctor a few days later, staff immediately tested his blood sugar levels. They were dangerously high—Smith’s body had stopped producing insulin, a vital hormone that allows the body to turn the glucose in food into usable energy.

Like 1.25 million other Americans, Smith was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Unlike Type 2, a more common condition sometimes linked to high body weight, Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease caused when white blood cells attack the pancreas, killing insulin-producing cells. There is no cure for Type 1, and it can’t be treated with pills or other noninvasive procedures; artificial insulin must be injected into the patient several times per day.

“Without insulin, people with Type 1 diabetes will die,” said David Nathan, a professor at Harvard Medical School, in an interview with the HPR. “And not over a long period of time, but over the course of a week.”

For Smith, then a server at Khan’s Mongolian Barbeque in Richfield, Minn., the diagnosis was life-changing. At first, he had trouble maintaining his active lifestyle—Smith loved hiking, fishing, concerts, Minnesota sports, and playing with his young daughter Savannah—but in time his nutritionist and endocrinologist helped him bring his diabetes under control.