Remember, taking your insulin correctly makes a big difference in your blood sugar. Use these easy ideas, or write down your own ideas to help you feel more comfortable about taking insulin.

NOTE: Living with Diabetes: An Everyday Guide for You and Your Family was produced by the ACP Foundation for patients with diabetes. Designed in a magazine format with lots of photos and a conversational style, the guide is an entirely new means of patient education in that the emphasis is on action (what patients need to do every day to manage their diabetes), rather than on an exchange of information. This guide is copyrighted and is available in both English and Spanish versions.

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From the ACP Diabetes Care Guide

Practical tips for patients who are beginning insulin therapy.

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Before you had diabetes, your body made enough insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. Now that you have diabetes, you may need to take extra insulin to help control your blood sugar.

NOTE: Living with Diabetes: An Everyday Guide for You and Your Family was produced by the ACP Foundation for patients with diabetes. Designed in a magazine format with lots of photos and a conversational style, the guide is an entirely new means of patient education in that the emphasis is on action (what patients need to do every day to manage their diabetes), rather than on an exchange of information. This guide is copyrighted and is available in both English and Spanish versions.

order the guide | preview this chapter (pdf)

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (also called juvenile diabetes) occurs when the pancreas stops making insulin. Insulin helps the body use the energy in foods. Without insulin, blood levels of sugar become high. Over time, high blood sugar levels can lead to blindness, kidney failure, damage to nerves, and heart disease.

To keep blood sugar levels in the normal range, people with type 1 diabetes must inject insulin several times each day and follow a special diet. There are several types of insulin. Short-acting (regular or lispro) insulins begin to act soon after injection.

Long-acting (neutral protamine Hagedorn [NPH], lente, ultralente, or glargine) insulins do not begin to act until several hours after injection, but then they continue to act for many hours. For example, a dinnertime injection of long-acting insulin controls sugar levels throughout the night.

A very low blood sugar level (hypoglycemia) is a dangerous complication of insulin treatment. To avoid hypoglycemia during the night, doctors often tell patients to "split" their evening insulin dose by taking short-acting insulin at dinner and long-acting insulin at bedtime instead of taking both forms of insulin at dinnertime ("mixing").

However, nobody has done a careful study to see whether "splitting" is truly better than "mixing" the evening insulin.

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The newly approved OneTouch Ping Glucose Management System allows patients to calculate and deliver insulin doses without touching their pumps.

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Search MedlinePlus.gov from the National Library of Medicine for a variety of resources about insulin.

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GlucoControl is a free PDA program (for Pocket PC), that helps patients to control the glucose levels in blood, replacing the classic diabetes notebook.

Due to the complexity of the system, this tool is recommended for advanced PDA users, only.

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The Diabetes Log program is a complete tracking tool to help patients keep track of relevant information. Users can enter their BG level, insulin, activities, carbohydrate counts on each meal, etc.

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GlucoTools is a set of tools for PalmOS-based PDAs that assist patients with diabetes who are using insulin. The system is geared primarily towards patients who use insulin pumps, but may also be useful for patients who are not using pumps, as well, since the system enables patients to double-check meal and correction boluses.

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