It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that in a clinical setting, women that had personalized diabetes care thrived far better than those that had generic care. Researchers found that the women who had a personally tailored approach made for them for their diabetes treatment had a lower mortality rate after six years. The study was conducted in Denmark, and followed 1,381 patients with Type 2 diabetes.
One surprise result of this study was that there was not much of a difference when it came to the mortality rate of men. The reasoning behind this conclusion is unclear still, and more research will be needed in this area to find a cause for this. It should be pointed out, though, that for a statistically valid and representative study of the American population to have been conducted, a larger sample size would be needed. Again, more attention will need to be given to this to see if there was a flaw with the study or if men truly do not respond as well as women to individualized diabetes care.
When it comes to other types of care, personalization is also beneficial. Think about in-home care, for starters. Would you want a caregiver that is able to respond precisely to your elderly loved one’s needs, or would you rather that they followed a cookie cutter approach and never took varying needs into account? The answer here should be quite clear. A customized approach to care allows the caregiver, doctor, or whomever, to make little changes as they go to ensure that the exactly correct level of assistance is always being administered. Sometimes this requires a caregiver to do a little bit more, sometimes it requires a little bit less. It all depends on the individual person in need.
In the above mentioned study, women that received personalized care were found to be 26 percent less likely to die of any cause, 30 percent less likely to die of diabetes related causes, and 41 percent less likely to suffer a stroke. These are encouraging numbers, and they stress the importance of high quality health care of any sort. The problem that many elderly folk face, though, is that they either are not being seen by a medical professional often enough, or they are not getting individualized attention. Both of these are easily preventable, even if your loved one is reliant on Medicare and Medicaid. And now that many states are offering a limited form of in-home care along with state sponsored insurance plans, getting personalized attention is easier now than ever before. However, this is hardly ever the default course of action. Your loved one needs an advocate, and although this is a lot of responsibility to take on, it is for someone that you love and that loves you. Ensuring that a highly trained professional caregiver is helping your family out is a small step to take given these facts. It’s just a matter of being persistent until you find a service that is able to provide you with the best caregiver for your loved one’s needs.
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