A History Of Diabetes - By: brekal677

"A history of diabetes can help yo understand its origins and its current therapy."

Most of my natural weight loss clients have diabetes. I am also getting at least one email a week of someone saying their child has diabetes. Most of the time the current treatment of diabetes prohibits weight loss. Because of this I have to resolve the diabetes first.

Sometimes my natural weight loss clients are concerned because what I do is so different from what is accepted as "therapy" for diabetes. So I am writing about the history of diabetes to get an overview of how diabetes treatment
was developed.

History of Diabetes: Origins

The term diabetes was coined by the physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia. It was derived from the Greek verb, diabaínein, itself formed from the prefix dia-, "across, apart," and the verb bainein, "to walk, stand."

The verb diabeinein meant "to stride, walk, or stand with legs asunder"; hence, its derivative diabÄ"tÄ"s meant "one that straddles," or specifically "a compass, siphon." The sense "siphon" gave rise to the use of diabÄ"tÄ"s as the name for a disease involving the discharge of excessive amounts of urine.

History of Diabetes: First Recordings

Diabetes is first recorded in English, in the form diabete, in a medical text written around 1425. In 1675, Thomas Willis added the word mellitus, from the Latin meaning "honey", a reference to the sweet taste of the urine. This sweet taste had been noticed in urine by the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, and Persians. In 1776, Matthew Dobson confirmed that the sweet taste was because of an excess of a kind of sugar in the urine and blood of people with diabetes.

Although diabetes has been recognized since antiquity, and treatments of various efficacy have been known in various regions since the Middle Ages, and in legend for much longer, the causes of diabetes has only been understood experimentally since about 1900.

History of Diabetes: Role of the Pancreas

The discovery of a role for the pancreas in diabetes is generally ascribed to Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski. In 1889, they found that dogs whose pancreas were removed, developed all the signs and symptoms of diabetes and died shortly afterwards.

In 1910, Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer suggested that people with diabetes were deficient in a single chemical that was normally produced by the pancreas-he proposed calling this substance insulin, from the Latin insula, meaning island, in reference to the insulin-producing islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.

History of Diabetes: Discovery of Insulin

The endocrine role of the pancreas in metabolism, and indeed the existence of insulin, was not further clarified until 1921, when Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best repeated the work of Von Mering and Minkowski, and went further to demonstrate they could reverse induced diabetes in dogs by giving them an extract from the pancreatic islets of Langerhans of healthy dogs.

History of Diabetes: Insulin Becomes A Therapy

Banting, Best, and colleagues (especially the chemist Collip) went on to purify the hormone insulin from bovine pancreases at the University of Toronto. This led to the availability of an effective treatment-insulin injections-and the first patient was treated in 1922. For this, Banting and laboratory director MacLeod received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923.

History of Diabetes: Type 1 & Type 2

The distinction between what is now known as type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes was first clearly made by Sir Harold Percival (Harry) Himsworth, and published in January 1936.

About the Author

My name is Yegyan and I am a Certified Nutritional Consultant (CNC) and Holistic Health Practitioner. You can learn about my Natural Weight Loss method called Metabolism Makeover at http://www.natural-weight-loss-myths-revealed.com/metabolism-makeover-book.html

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