Patient education

Sometimes....you certainly hope it does!

if they understand the relationship between glucose levels and choices made. No point in checking levels if you do not intend to pay attention to the numbers.

Depends. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. We can teach patients what they need to know to take care of themselves and to reduce their incidence do diabetes-related complications, but individuals will do (or not do) as they please with that knowledge.

GOOD diabetes education affects a patient's glucose control.

If patients can learn about carbohydrate counting, insulin reisistance (and how exercise mitigates it), and dawn phenomenon it helps them see how much power they have in managing their disease. The Riva Greenberg book "50 Diabetes Myths That Can Ruin Your Life; And the 50 Diabetes Trusts That Can Save It" is a great resource.

All the education in the world cannot change a patient's glucose control habits if they don't want to change.

Good phrase!

Just substitute the words 'glucose control" to anything detrimental (hypertension, obesity, drug/alcohol abuse, etc) and you've said a mouthful.

That's definitely true and it's frustrating working with people who are stubborn or have victim mentalities.

But the reality is that our nursing and medical schools still do a pretty terrible job of diabetes education. Because of that there are healthcare providers who don't have a basic knowledge of diabetes management. Sometimes health professionals have decent patients and give them bad advice about diabetes, then label the patients noncompliant when they fail.

Agreed. There is a fine line between shaming patients (how many times do hospitalized pts tell me they are "bad diabetics") versus sharing relevant information at the pt's level of understanding and then holding him/her accountable.I tell folks that I can order all the right tests, prescribe the correct meds, inform them and refer them for full DM education, etc., but the daily mgmt of this lifelong disorder is entirely in his/her hands. A lot of pts don't want to hear that...

The literature definitely shows a positive correlation between diabetes self-management education (DSME from CDE's and RD's) and cost-savings as well as avoidance of complications, hospitalizations, etc both for people with prediabetes and diabetes. Not so much for non-CDE providers (for example, RD's have better outcomes than MDs who try to give patients diet advice): studies comparing usual care provided by physicians to MNT services provided by RDs show that RDs produce better lipid,diet, physical activity, and weight outcomes (Hooker, Williams, Papneja, Sen, Hogan, 2012 pS84).

Here is a sort of literature review or annotated bibliography that I found. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.chronic...tracts2012.pdf


The CDC also has the Diabetes Prevention Program which is shown to really impact people's disease progression.

These are formal programs. This is not the MD telling the patient what to do. This is structured. So there may be some bias in there that patients who go to these are already self-selecting and are more motivated than patients who do not.

So similar to what others have said, the answer is "Yes, but..."