If you want to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in diabetes, nothing can compare with the wealth of information available on the Web. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! will bring thousands of stories to your desktop, when you click on them.
The only cost is your time.
That's the catch. They don't come to you automatically. You have to ask for them.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could automate the process so the news came to your computer when it appeared? The good news is that you can. You can set up several of these services. Each of them links Web sites you can go to for information in greater depth.
The American Diabetes Association has long provided several emailed newsletters. Weekly consumer and health care professional newsletters provide the latest diabetes news and events. A monthly advocacy newsletter tells how you can actively support efforts to make finding a cure for diabetes a national priority. A bi-monthly parents' newsletter sends news, information, tips, hints, and resources to help you manage your child's diabetes. From time to time you can also receive a book newsletter about such things as new cookbooks, meal planners, and self-care guides. To subscribe to any or all of these newsletters go to Diabetes E-Newsletters.
Another of my long-time favorites is Paula Ford-Martin's About Diabetes weekly newsletter. You can sign up for this and dozens of other About newsletters at About Newsletters.
For the past two years I have even had my own newsletter in response to requests for an easy way for people to find my new articles on diabetes. I call it Diabetes Update, and it appears monthly. While this newsletter exists to keep my readers up-to-date with my columns and articles, I also use the newsletter to review important new developments in diabetes and some of the best new books. The issue that is current as I update this article is online. To subscribe just send me an email in any form.
The newest and one of the most attractive diabetes newsletters is Talking Diabetes Online. It includes nine themes or areas of interest that you can subscribe to receive. They call one of these theme areas Diabetes Update—which is not to be confused with my Diabetes Update newsletter!
Another perhaps misleading name the site uses implies that it is talking about diabetes. It is, of course, writing about diabetes, and the only site where you can regularly hear people literally talking about diabetes is HealthTalk Interactive's Diabetes Education Network, where you can read or listen to any HealthTalk feature article.
Talking Diabetes Online is a U.K. site aimed at British audiences. So some terminology is different, such as "tablets" instead of "pills" or "oral medication." It also uses British units of blood glucose measurement, mmol/l instead of mg/dl, which we use here. You can, however, easily convert the values at the Children with Diabetes Blood Sugar Converter.
Those nitpicks aside, this is one of the best places for people just diagnosed with diabetes. You can read the archives of the site back to August 2002, the month that it started. Novo Nordisk A/S, the huge Danish healthcare company that manufactures insulin and oral medications for people with diabetes, sponsors the site.
Catch these emails while you can. Like Web sites
they tend to come and go.
in my
column this past March, The
Varieties of Diabetes News, I was enthusiastic about a new email service
called Diabetes News Digest sponsored by Clip Genius. Alas, that service
hasn't been heard from since October.
Also down, at least temporarily, is Diabetes This
Week, diabetes news from Diabetes
Mall. Editor John Walsh tells
me that in July he had to stop publishing his newsletter to concentrate
on a new book about diabetes.
Novo Nordisk announced May 27 that it had discontinued Talking Diabetes Online.
The American Diabetes Association originally published this article on its Web site as one of my “About the Internet” columns.
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