In the case of diabetes, there are many cases of successful treatment, especially for those patients for whom diet and exercise are extremely effective for blood glucose control. Medication is also key to keeping blood glucose levels in the normal range.
But if you take your diabetes medication every day, as many patients do, you may wonder if it’s possible to stop taking your medication. Discontinuing medications is not completely unattainable – if blood glucose levels are consistently in a healthy range and the patient is adhering to a healthy lifestyle.
First, a doctor should be consulted. This article also provides the following information.
Why do you want to stop taking your medication?
The first thing to know, says Dr. Robert Gabbay, chief medical officer of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, is to ask your doctor if you can stop your medication once you have reached your jointly set blood sugar goal.
It’s possible to do that, he added.
Step 1: Tell your doctor why you want to stop the medication. Your doctor will ask a few questions.
Dr. Gregg Faiman, an endocrinologist at the Case Medical Center at Cleveland University Hospital, said doctors need to find specific answers. Doctors want to know the following things:
- Is it extremely difficult for you to stay on your medication?
- Do the side effects reduce your quality of life?
- Is the medication too expensive to take?
- Is the medication too expensive?
The patient and doctor must then agree on how to subsequently control blood glucose levels, and Faiman said that if the drug had not been needed, it would not have been taken before. “The decision to stop the medication needs to be discussed in depth. Diabetes must be kept under control.”
The importance of medication
Faiman said that if one takes metformin, a drug commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes, doctors can taper it off while losing weight and getting fit.
Faiman also said that patients who choose to implement a healthy lifestyle and keep their blood sugar under control at lower doses for several months may even want to stop taking the drug – at least for a while.
If a doctor decides to have a patient try to stop or change to a lower dose of medication, he will monitor the patient’s condition closely.
This means that patients still have to keep up with their own blood glucose monitoring, Faiman said, adding that when a doctor recommends a glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) test to make sure the blood glucose level is still at target, patients still need to get tested.
Discontinuation is more likely if only one medication (eg, metformin) is taken rather than multiple medications. With relentless adherence to a healthy diet and long-term exercise, it may be possible to reduce the dose of the medication or reduce one of the medications.
May not be able to stop medication forever
Despite best efforts at healthy eating and exercise, you may have to start taking your medications again at some point.
Diabetes is a progressive disease, Gabbay said. It may be possible to stop medication early in the course of diabetes, but not for long, even for patients in the best shape.
One study had people with diabetes make huge lifestyle changes. They exercised 175 minutes a week and ate 1200 to 1800 calories a day. Most of the patients showed at least partial remission, indicating that they were able to keep their blood glucose levels within their normal diabetic goals without medications or weight loss surgery.
The patients in the best shape were those who lost significant weight and became very healthy. They were also patients with newly diagnosed diabetes or with milder disease and not on insulin.
This change lasted only a few years, although some patients were able to stop taking their medication. After that, only about half of the patients who were in initial remission remained in remission.
It’s not their fault; it’s a normal course of biology, Gabbay said. Doctors never want patients to be discouraged by restarting medications or increasing their dose.
“Lifestyle changes are extremely effective, but so are medications,” he said. In the long run, medications can have an extremely significant impact on a patient’s life.