In honor of LADA Awareness Week, I wanted to reprint a column I published at Diabetes Daily in May of this year.

In November of 2008, a few months after my diagnosis, I attended a World Diabetes Day event at a local public health facility. This was my first opportunity to meet diabetics I’d known online, and I met five. One of those five was a woman who’d contracted diabetes as an adult and been initially misdiagnosed as being Type 2. Another was also in that situation – but didn’t yet know it. That’s two out of five. It’s a tiny, non-random sample, but it’s still 40% of that tiny, non-random sample.

I suppose that there must be dozens of pairs of medical conditions where something relatively uncommon initially looks a lot like something that’s very common. So, I’m not blaming individual doctors. (Though, anecdotal evidence suggests to me that SOME doctors DESERVE blame.)

My argument here is that the medical community needs to come up with some sort of process to screen newly-diagnosed T2s to make sure that they’re not actually LADA.

If the tests that would actually diagnose or exclude LADA are too expensive to be done routinely, there needs to be some kind of screening. Maybe there’s a cheaper test that would give an indication. Or a series of questions that could be asked.

If nothing else, perhaps the doctor could ask the “new T2″ to come back in two weeks with their fasting numbers. If the fasting numbers weren’t improving, the reasons why could be investigated, even if it was just a matter of the patient being unable to tolerate the prescribed medicine.

Why am I making a fuss about this? Because people are suffering:

* At the beginning of this article, I mentioned a woman who did not yet know that she was LADA. She was very faithfully doing what she’d been told. She was taking her medicine. She was eating like a bird. And she was exercising hours a day in the attempt to control her blood sugar. This went on for months before another person in the community helped her get in touch with a doctor who got her going in the right direction.
* My fellow DD blogger Sara Knicks almost died from the medical advice she got. Find her story here.
* Just this afternoon, I learned on Twitter of a young man, diagnosed as T2, who could not get below the 400s. This situation is complimented by a lack of insurance, but the trouble he’s having in getting listened to even in the hospital, whether he’s actually LADA or not, is heartbreaking.

Do we really need for people to nearly die before medical providers look past the obvious, even though the obvious is almost always correct? Is it really necessary that people undergo months of damage to their organs, not to mention feeling terrible, before other possibilities are considered? Wouldn’t it be vastly better to develop a process that would catch the exceptions sooner?

I’m neither a doctor nor an authority on health care administration. Maybe what I’m calling for is in some way impractical. Or maybe the protocols I’m asking for are already in place, and we just need more doctors and hospitals to know them and to use them.

Whatever the case: something needs to be done.