To Care or Not to Care - "Severe Low %"

G6 is truly a different animal. We had a fair bit of healthy skepticism with the G5, but the G6 gives us less reason to question it. I am not saying it is 100% accurate, just that it is accurate enough for us to dose off of, and to question the results less.

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Completely agree with this. Sure, it has the lag effect still, but compared to the g4 and g5 (which would frequently be off by 40+ when I was steady) I am very happy with the g6’s performance in the accuracy department

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I believe it. I expect I will jump as soon as it’s available in Canada. But I know that’ll mean saying goodbye to 40-days-per-sensor, which means in the near future, when my partner retires and I have to pay out of pocket again, I’d probably have to return to the G4. But by that time there may be other affordable options.

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Yeah… probably good advice

Not sure if it works this way in the real world but I think I’d like to find a good responsive primary care doc and not worry about a specialist unless I reach the point of having any complications… I’ve had better experience with PC docs in general

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You may have luck finding a GP that treats diabetics, we have not had much luck in this area. My kids current GP doesn’t even know the difference between the insulins, and one time we mentioned they had just treated a low while we were waiting and that freaked out the physician. If all you need is a scrip pad, you can probably find that.

Our family doc here in bunpkinville has a t1 daughter and a t2 wife and has been very responsive and good to me and recognizes that I am an important person, as is he, in our tiny little corner of the world…

The visiting specialist, even though he’s been to my house countless times, worked with my wife, and seems to consider himself a personal friend of mine, has not extended me any of those benefits… so it really is a crap shoot I think

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That’s true, that the percentages will all shift up or at least redistribute. If youre using it as a crystal ball to predict your absolute, perfect average BG or 100% predict your A1C, I agree that’s a problem.

But we’re not really doing that; we’re using it as a guideline for whether we’re doing good, and for children the standards for high, low and in range are very lax for the high and the in range percentages and much tighter for the low percentage. I could bring Samson in with less than 50 percent time in between 80 and 200 and my endo would probably be happier with his control than it is now, assuming he had no time below 70. At his age anyone with an A1C below 7.5 is considered to be doing good.

However, most endos target a low percentage of less than 0.5% critically low and less than maybe 5% below 70 for kids. So the fact that the low data from Dexcom is skewed makes a relatively big difference for meeting those targets.

So as an example: Let’s say Samson spends about 7.5% time in the low range according to Clarity and about 75% between 70 and 180. Even if ALL of that LOW percentage on Dexcom was false, and all shoved up into the “in range” category, and everything else were pushed up, he would still be considered in “good control” by my endo. And realistically, the prediction for the A1c – which is the only validated metric tied to long-term complications – would also be not far off, likely by 0.3 or less.

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