Dr. Richard Bernstein

In 1946, I developed diabetes.  According to statistics, I should have been dead years ago. But today I am in excellent health and have outlived all but a handful of people who developed diabetes when I did. 

Twenty-seven years ago, I had already suffered many of the disorders long associated with diabetes, and even my doctor, who was president of the American Diabetes Association, could do nothing to slow their advance.   

Today the progression of those complications has long been stopped, and some of them have reversed.  I’m healthier now than I was then. I still have diabetes. My body still makes no insulin, and I have to have injections every day. How am I different from all those who have died, and all those whose bodies are disintegrating because of chroni­cally high blood sugars? I haven’t had any sort of transplant I haven’t had any miracle drug. 

Recent research has repeatedly demonstrated what I learned seren­dipitously more than a quarter-century ago, that the grave long-term consequences of the nation’s third leading cause of death can be prevented and even reversed if caught in time. How?  By keeping blood sugars normal around the clock. 

Despite this knowledge, the procedures for attaining blood sugar normalization are only practiced at a few research centers and by a handful of enlightened physicians, and educators. 

My book and this column will attempt to present nearly everything I know about blood sugar normalization, how it can be accomplished and main­tained. With it, I hope that you will help your patients learn to take control of their diabetes, whether it’s Type I (juvenile-onset), as mine is, or the much more common Type II (maturity-onset) diabetes. To my knowledge, there is no other book in print addressed strictly to blood sugar control for both types of diabetes. 

They also contain much material that may be new to many physicians and educators treating diabetes. It is my hope that doctors and health care pro­fessionals will use it, learn from it, and do their best to help their pa­tients take control of this deadly but controllable disease. 

The book, though it contains considerable background information on diet and nutrition, is intended primarily as a comprehensive how-to guide to blood sugar control, including detailed instructions on tech­niques for painless insulin injection and so on.   

If, you seriously help your patients follow the guidelines taught in this book, you should be able to help them avoid the discomfort of inap­propriate blood sugar swings, and perhaps be able to prevent or reverse the development of the grave complications long associated with chron­ically high blood sugars. 

Richard K Bernstein, M.D., F.A.C.E., F.A.C.N., C.W.S.