A Doctor Learns from His Patient How to Reverse Diabetes
A Doctor Learns from His Patient How to Reverse Diabetes
Dr. Unwin has now put his 129th patient into drug-free T2 diabetes remission. But he didn't always practice medicine this way.
Dr. David Unwin, a physician in the U.K., once believed the mainstream dogma about Type 2 diabetes that most physicians believe and that most medical schools teach: that medication is the best treatment.
But his beliefs changed when he called one of his patients to ask why she hadn’t been refilling the diabetes meds he had prescribed her. The patient made an appointment. When she entered the room, Dr. Unwin was in for a surprise.
She was hopping mad. She said: ‘You’ve given me metformin for about 10 years and you never once asked me about the side effects or gave me an alternative. I’ve now learned about cutting the carbs. I’ve lost weight and I feel fabulous.’
Dr. Unwin ordered an A1c test (a blood test that measures average blood sugar over previous 3 months) and found that she had in fact put her diabetes into full remission without drugs. Now Dr. Unwin was ready to listen to his patient.
He says:
She’d done something I didn’t know was possible. I had always seen Type 2 diabetes as a chronic, deteriorating condition requiring medication and shown no curiosity about the true cause of chronic illness. I felt as if I’d been sleepwalking.
The best part about this story is that Dr. Unwin woke up from his sleepwalk and changed how he practiced medicine from the testimony of this one patient.
He and his wife began offering low-carb support and education to his diabetic patients. They even started a free support group that met every Monday. One by one, patients began losing weight, lowering blood sugar, and coming off of insulin and meds.
Dr. Unwin and four other authors published this observational study in the British Medical Journal showing that 77% of his patients on the program had put their diabetes into remission after a year.
Dr. Simon Tobin, one of the authors of the study, says:
If you had a drug that did half of what we have done with the low-carb approach, it would be worth an absolute fortune.
But there is no drug that can replace a change in diet. Some doctors know that diet is absolutely more effective than drugs but they don’t believe patients can stick with diet changes. That isn’t Dr. Tobin’s experience:
Many of our patients have been low carb for six, eight or ten years, so it is completely sustainable. No one is shouting about it because it is not a drug that’s making a profit for a big pharmaceutical company.
The truly great part is not just that patients were able to save money by coming off drugs. The best part is that their bodies were no longer being damaged by diabetes. Medication cannot keep diabetes from causing heart disease, blocked arteries, foot sores, infections, painful neuropathy, damaged eyesight, and finally amputations.
My eye doctor is a fan of this newsletter and loves talking to me about diabetes. When I went in last week, he showed me images of the eyes of his diabetic patients (covering up their names for privacy reasons) so I could see the damage done to the blood vessels by high blood sugar. It is so sad to see the body suffering from a treatable condition. Of course, he shows them to encourage them to change.
If only more doctors had the humility of Dr. Unwin to change their beliefs mid-career for the good of their patients.
A study titled Incidence of Remission in Adults With Type 2 Diabetes: The Diabetes & Aging Study published in the journal Diabetes Care found that in a cohort of 122,781 people, only 1.7% of diabetics went into remission over seven years. These were all patients receiving standard diabetes care (diabetes drugs but no counsel to fast or reduce carbs).
Compare that with how 77% of Dr. Unwin’s patients who followed his program went into remission after 1 year. But many medical schools still teach that meds are as effective as diet? 🤷🏼♀️
Meanwhile, Dr. Unwin just put his 129th diabetic patient into drug-free T2 diabetes remission! Look at how swiftly the patient’s blood sugar dropped when he reduced carbs! I’m thankful for physicians like Dr. Unwin.
