Diabetes and the Media

It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't position, you know. People with diabetes don't want to be discriminated against because of their diabetes, and some of them go to extraordinary lengths to seem just like other people. But when everybody was so excited that Nat Strand won that race, no one mentioned that she had several episodes where she would have died without the help of her partner. No one mentions what could happen to that race car driver if he had a sudden unexpected low on the track, either. You see the smiling faces of all these super-healthy, attractive young people with diabetes on all kinds of advertisements, or you see equally handsome, not quite as slender, but still healthy looking older people, so who can blame the world for thinking that managing diabetes is not particularly difficult?

While it's true that diabetics should NOT be discriminated against, and should be able to do anything they're capable of, the media, in both articles and advertisements, gives a VERY distorted view, and the public has no way of knowing any different. And you're right, it's irritating as hell!