| One thing that I would object to is this characterization from the article: >There are people who take insulin pumps (which provide insulin in very small very frequent doses and are ~permanently injected into your body, but are otherwise dumb as a brick) and combine them with continuous glucose monitors, and make the glucose measurements inform and control the pump. This is called “closed loop” or “artificial pancreas”, and getting one officially is very hard or impossible: not FDA approved yet / you need to be part of an university study to get one / … It’s one of those things that “will be here in 5 years”, they say every year for the past 30 years. I've had a Medtronic CGM and pump for 6 years now (680G, now 780G). It is an FDA approved system with feedback from the CGM to the pump. The only thing I needed to get insurance approval was a blood test showing that I was T1 and not T2. The auto mode has been greatly improved in the 780G pump vs. the 680G pump. I only need to stick my finger a couple times a week, and my control has improved. Without the pump and MDI it was quite a bit higher. It's nowhere near as good as an actual pancreas, but it is definitely not vaporware by any stretch of the imagination. The Medtronic support is (mostly good), and I have a pretty high degree of confidence that it will keep me alive. I do have Kwikpens as backup in case of malfunctions - which do happen. The biggest things for me are as simple as ripping your infusion set out while away from home, or the thing has an intractable Bluetooth communications problem or other kind of hardware error. The author is pretty much 100% right about "vibes" though, even with a pump. |
The concern is the the G7 CGM seems to have times where it is so wildly off with readings that a closed loop system could kill her. This weekend the CGM was saying she was all the sudden at 40, but she was at about 115. I am scared to think what would happen in the night if the closed loop system thought it needed to raise her blood sugar... Logically I know it wouldnt raise it to a point that would cause medical harm, it would still put it higher than would be ideal for her health.
Maybe there are differences between the different brands, but the G7 from Dexcom's big selling point was "no more calibrations" and the FDA approval for that tagline, and we've been seeing a need to calibrate more than the G6, which is disappointing. Granted... sample size of n=1 so...