Inside look: A physician’s success story as a prediabetic patient

As a patient enrollee in her local diabetes prevention program, Nancy Nielsen, MD, PhD, didn’t want anyone to know she was a physician. But now she’s sharing her experience far and wide because it quite possibly changed her life. Altering her family history “My father had his first heart attack when I was in ninth grade, and he died at 62—a diabetic,” Dr. Nielsen, an internal medicine physician, told physicians last month. “So were both his parents and seven of his eight siblings. And so I knew: With a sedentary lifestyle, I was a prime candidate.” Dr. Nielsen last month spoke to two groups of physician leaders at the 2016 AMA Annual Meeting and a special meeting of the AMA Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium and Improving Health Outcomes initiative, which focused on preparing students how to best care for patients with chronic diseases. Dr. Nielsen is a past president of the AMA and senior associate dean for health policy at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. “It was at an AMA meeting that I got my hemoglobin A1c,” Dr. Nielsen said. “It was creeping up. Isn’t denial so interesting in all of us? I thought I was eating healthy, but I never had time to measure or count or really worry about all this stuff. I really thought I was eating healthy.” That’s when Dr. Nielsen got a referral from her primary care physician to participate in the YMCA’s...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news