Who's She anyway? Who Cares what a Blogger thinks?

It would have been nice if the journalist had identified me correctly as the author of the "What they Don't Tell You about Diabetes" web site and a long-term poster on alt.support.diabetes, not as "a blogger".

I've got an 8 year long record of posting about diabetes-related topics online, and my web site (based on a ridiculous numbers of hours of combing through medical research papers) comes out very high on a lot of Google searches for diabetes-related topics. But like most journalists, she probably things blogs are "in" and web sites and newsgroups are "so old fashioned."

Unfortunately, the net result of the way she presented what I told her is that the reader, quite reasonably says, "Who cares what she thinks." I'd say the same thing myself.

The whole episode is pretty silly. I started the blog about two weeks ago just as an experiment after putting out hundreds of thousands of words on alt.support.diabetes over the years and immediately I end up, complete with awful photograph, in Business Week. This is not really a thrill, since the whole point of talking with the magazine writer was to see if maybe an important point could be gotten across.

Sadly, not a single substantive thing I had to say made it into the article. Too bad she didn't at least quote me as saying that shooting insulin is painless and that an ad campaign that stresses the awfulness of insulin injections will only make life harder for people with Type 2 diabetes who are unnecessarily scared of something that is No Big Deal.

Immunizations hurt. Blood draws hurt. Insulin shots are painless.

End of message!