Patient’s family asks: My partner, female, 78 years old, has been suffering from diabetes since 1984, has been taking Novocain tablets 2 mg (3 times a day, 1 tablet each time) and insulin injection (20 in the morning, 10 at night). Since February 2009 began to sweat on the forehead every night, after treatment by Chinese medicine to take decoction, but after taking but sweat more than before taking the drug, after taking 2 weeks due to increased sweating and stopped taking. But recently, not only my forehead sweats, but also my body sweats. How should I treat it? Answer from Director Zhang Min: Hello! From your letter, we need to identify the cause of the sweating, and once we find the cause, the problem will be solved. First of all, consider whether your partner has hypoglycemia or hypoglycemic reaction. Diabetic patients with symptoms such as panic, hand trembling, hunger, cold sweat when using hypoglycemic drugs, and blood sugar value below 3.9mmol/L is hypoglycemia; if blood sugar drops too fast during the medication, from 20-30mmol/L to 5-6mmol/L in a short time, although the blood sugar value does not reach below 3.9mmol/L, there will also be panic, hand trembling, hunger, cold sweat and other symptoms. This is the hypoglycemic reaction. The elderly have a poorer ability to respond to hypoglycemia, and if it persists for a long time and is not detected and corrected in time, it will easily cause the dysfunction of important organs of the body and even lead to death, which is very dangerous. Generally speaking, elderly patients should use hypoglycemic drugs with relatively small side effects, short duration of action and easy to be cleared from the body quickly, which can reduce the incidence of hypoglycemia, and even if it happens, it is not very serious. From the letter, it can be seen that the hypoglycemic drugs your partner is using are not reasonable and prone to hypoglycemia, so you should adjust the drug regimen in time and pay attention to blood glucose monitoring. You can test your finger-end blood glucose several times a day or promptly when you sweat, and you can also go to an endocrine specialist to adopt an advanced dynamic blood glucose monitoring system to detect some hypoglycemia that is difficult to be detected. Once the hypoglycemia is corrected, the sweating will also be improved. If hypoglycemia is no longer present after medication adjustment, and the patient still sweats frequently, then autonomic neuropathy of the sweat glands is considered to be present. Sweating gland autonomic neuropathy is one of the chronic complications of diabetes mellitus, often manifested as excessive sweating, little sweating or even no sweating, half sweating and half no sweating, and sometimes accompanied by fever, panic attacks and other symptoms, clinically need to be distinguished from hypoglycemia. Western medicine is mainly used to control blood sugar and nourish nerves, but the improvement of symptoms is not ideal, while Chinese medicine has its unique efficacy in this regard. In Chinese medicine, it is classified as “sweating”, and there are different types of symptoms such as yin deficiency and fire, heart and blood deficiency, disharmony of Ying and Wei, and lack of consolidation of Lung and Wei, etc. As long as the evidence is properly identified and the medicine is used correctly, the effect of stopping sweating is very obvious. If your partner’s sweating is more pronounced after taking Chinese medicine, we suggest that you take your partner to the hospital for further treatment. In addition, a thyroid function test can be done to rule out sweating due to causes other than diabetes.