The “motivated patient”, highlights from the American Association of Diabetes Educators’ annual meeting, as well as big changes here at diaTribe…
What motivates people? Is it fear of failure or the desire for power? Is it greed? Is it vanity or virtue or the desire to please? The greatest minds in world history have grappled with these questions, but in the world of diabetes, the question itself has life or death consequences. As we all know, the “unmotivated patient” has little chance of maintaining good health.
These thoughts often came to mind during the recent American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) 37th Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. The diabetes educators know better than anyone that therapies are useless unless patients are motivated to eat right, exercise, and take the proper medication, so we were thrilled that so many educators have been tackling the “M” word – motivation – head on.
We share the latest thinking on this issue in our Conference Pearls column. In addition, AADE Educator of the Year, Elaine Massaro, has some particularly keen insights on the matter, which she shared with us in diaTribe dialogue. She draws upon “motivational interviewing techniques” for goal setting and behavior change – techniques that allow educators “to dive into what motivates people, what goals they want to set, how confident they are in achieving those goals, and how they will be able to successfully deal with the barriers that interfere with goal achievement.”
We believe this is a powerful approach to an age-old problem, and we encourage you to read the entire interview as well as the highlights from the meeting itself.
Diabetes care, like so many other things, is moving online, but does online care really work for diabetes management? In this issue, we feature WellDoc’s mobile-based Diabetes Manager and spotlight TCOYD’s upcoming online show Extreme Diabetes Makeover. We also describe HealthSeeker (the first health-centric Facebook game) in New Now Next and provide a detailed product review of the BodyMedia FIT in Test Drive. Plenty of technological hurdles still need to be cleared, but the rise of online and mobile solutions should give people with diabetes new tools in the Information Age.
Finally, here at diaTribe, exciting changes are taking place. We recently asked for your feedback about our publication, and we were thrilled to receive so many insightful and helpful responses, nearly 2,000 in all. We really care about your thoughts on how to improve diaTribe and provide you with the most useful and relevant diabetes information. So from all of us here, big-time thanks.
From your responses, it was gratifying to see that diaTribe has aided many of you in several aspects of self-management: 76% of you said diaTribe helped you understand diabetes better, 73% of you said diaTribe made you better informed in discussions with doctors and educators, and 68% of you said diaTribe improved your confidence in managing diabetes. However, I realize that we can still do far, far more. With improvement in mind, one of the more frequent messages we received was the desire to see diaTribe published more often. As a result, we are happy to announce that diaTribe will now be published once-monthly beginning with this issue! Furthermore, many of you wished to see a more user-friendly website design, better ways of searching and displaying our article archives, and a way to forward articles to friends. In terms of content itself, many wanted us to focus more attention on diabetes devices (like CGM, meters, and pumps), type 2 diabetes medications, self-management tips, and stories from diabetes patients themselves. We look forward to incorporating these suggestions, along with several others, in our upcoming issues to ultimately provide you with a more powerful diabetes resource.
Best,
Kelly L. Close
