Last Sunday at #AADE17, I had the honor to be part of a presentation on the language of diabetes. Three of us, who are authors on the upcoming joint paper on language use in diabetes care and education, presented to a packed room plus an overflow room. I mention this because it is evidence that people care, or at least are curious about, the impact our messages have.
(And it turns out that the way we talk to and about people with diabetes does matter.)
A colleague told me later that as she was leaving the room, two attendees were walking close to her and chatting about the presentation. One of them said, “they obviously don’t deal with real problems in diabetes.” This immediately reminded me of people who don’t think someone is a nurse unless she/he works in a hospital at the bedside.
Diabetes educators provide valuable services in all sorts of locations and positions. I teach current and future diabetes educators (and see patients part-time), my colleague is a clinical psychologist working solely with people who have diabetes, and my other colleague leads programs for diabetes educators all over the world. We each address real problems of diabetes every day. They may not be the same problems those particular conference attendees see or deal with, but they are very real problems for the people we see.
Regardless of all that, we are all working toward the same goal: providing high quality care and education to people with diabetes, so they can have the best possible health outcomes and live full lives. We know that language is a problem that all people with diabetes deal with, and each of us can do something about it.