The problem of blame

We diabetic people are pretty familiar with the blame game. People like to blame us for our disease. "You ate too much sugar." "If you lost weight, your diabetes would go away." "Well, that's what you get for being fat and lazy."

None of this applies to people with Type 1 diabetes, of course, though we get lumped into this all the time. But it doesn't always apply to people with Type 2 diabetes, either. Not everyone with a diagnosis of Type 2 got it from being fat or lazy. For many people it was just the luck of the genetic draw. If your grandparent and/or parent had Type 2 diabetes, there's a good chance you'll get it eventually ,too, regardless of your weight or physical fitness level. There are also people who get Type 2 diabetes as a side effect of having another medical condition, such as polycystic ovarian syndrome, or whose weight gain was caused by a particular medication they were on. Many antidepressants and other psychiatric medications have weight gain as a side effect.

Even if a person did get Type 2 diabetes because of their weight, it's not helpful or supportive to keep blaming the person. I'm sure they didn't wake up one day and say, "Hey, I think I'm going to be fat now. I love being ridiculed by the general public and blamed for everything that's wrong with the health care system and demonized by the media." Telling a person that he or she got diabetes from being overweight isn't going to make their weight magically drop overnight, nor will telling them that their diabetes will go away if they lose it. (It won't, by the way. The person may be asymptomatic, but the diabetes will always be there, regardless of what Drew Carey or the latest celebrity with diabetes says.)

I mentioned the media. They're the ones who are largely to blame for this. Some 99 percent of the news stories about diabetes mention weight. I follow lots of diabetes "news" sources on Twitter and almost all of them are full of articles about diabetes and weight. The media just eats up stories about fat people, for some reason. Obesity + diabetes makes a good sound byte, I guess. News stories are limited for time (TV and radio) and space (newspapers and websites) so they can't go in to the very complex causes of diabetes. I doubt many of them have ever heard the term "autoimmune disease" or even know that there is more than one type of diabetes, let alone several types.

While diabetes seems to be the favourite target of the blame game, some other diseases get it too. Lung cancer is another popular target. I remember when some minor celebrity died of lung cancer. I mentioned on an online discussion forum that this person was not a smoker, so therefore we can't blame all cases of lung cancer on cigarettes. Well, I was immediately pounced on by people who told me that obviously, shne must have smoked at SOME point in her life; either that, or she had lived with smokers long enough to be exposed to enough secondhand smoke to develop lung cancer.

Why do people like to play the blame game? Well, I think for many it comes down to fear. If I'm afraid I'll get a particular disease, I can look around and say, "Well, I don't smoke," or "I'm not overweight," or "I don't eat junk food," or "I exercise regularly," therefore I won't get that disease, unlike the people who do smoke or who are overweight or who eat junk food or who don't exercise. It's probably reassuring in a way.

Then again, some people just like to make themselves look better than other people. I have encountered some people with Type 1 diabetes who consider themselves superior to those with Type 2 because we didn't get our disease from being fat.

I think in the end we all want the same thing: a cure for all types of diabetes. Unfortunately, the "blame game" stands in the way of that by making the general public think that if people just lost weight, their diabetes would be "cured" and that getting diabetes is our own fault, and if we just lived healthier lives we wouldn't get sick in the first place. So why donate money to research a disease that can be "cured" so easily?