Walking Thoughts

  My wheelie bin went walkabout after the last collection And still hasn’t come home. It’s labelled with 16 Harold in craft letters from my late mum, So it’s easy to. If it has accidentally moved in with you, please send it back - I promise to keep it well fed.

   42-year-old with type 1 diabetes experienced a  temporary return of insulin production  after receiving transplanted lab-grown insulin-producing cells.  The patient, who had lived with diabetes for nearly 40 years, had the cells implanted directly into his arm muscle.  For 12 weeks, his body produced its own insulin following the transplant.   This procedure involved transplanting  lab-grown beta cells ,  which are the type of cells that produce insulin in the pancreas.  In type 1 diabetes, these cells are destroyed by the body's immune system, leading to a complete lack of insulin.  Traditionally,  islet cell transplantation ,  where islet cells from a deceased donor are transplanted into the liver, is used to treat type 1 diabetes.  However, this new approach utilizes cells grown in a lab, offering a potential new avenue for treatment.   The 12-week period of insulin production in this patient is a promising...

It is 5 am and I am planning my daily walk. To meet the stepping challenge this summer. Why am I walking for diabetes UK?  Type 1 diabetes cannot be cured or reversed. It has nothing to do with eating sweets or a bad diet. In hospital with my child, at their diagnosis it was heartbreaking and overwhelming to watch them learn to inject themselves, to see his despair as his tiny fingers failed to bleed enough for the regular finger pricks, and to find enough fatty areas on his stick-thin legs and skinny tummy for insulin injection several times a day.  Type 1 diabetes, Once known as juvenile diabetes, is an autoimmune disease that diabetics live with for the rest of their lives. Over the past hundred years Scientific and engineering advances have been made. The first kept diabetics alive. And over time the result of research has improved their quality of life.  In the newest research, scientists have successfully transplanted lab-grown insulin-producing cells into a person ...

  In industry after industry, far too often when trying to change behaviour, businesses will often look to what others  within  their industry are doing and copy the playbook. They then wonder why their problems aren’t going away. To those who have utilised lateral category analysis however (where you look to companies outside of your category to see if they’ve already cracked your problem or a similar one), some of the improvements have been astounding… A UK Children’s Hospital back in the 90s wanted to reduce its error rate. Instead of speaking with internal colleagues or those from other hospitals about the best plan of attack, the team looked laterally and consulted with Formula 1 pit crew teams. By reviewing video of the hospital’s procedures as well as showing videos of their own manoeuvres, suggestions were able to be made that stemmed from  their   world . One such change was for the hospital to deploy a pit crew “lollipop man” (this is the person that h...

Diabetics need sweets. After a week by my child’s hospital bedside unwashed, unchanged, we were finally going home. But before we even crossed our own threshold, the hospital gave me one urgent task: go buy sweets. High-sugar drinks, Haribo, juice boxes, anything fast-acting. Because when your child has diabetes, those sweets aren’t treats - they’re medicine. So I left the hospital and headed straight to the shops, grabbing multipacks of juice, gummy bears, and containers to send to school, to keep by the bed, to stash in every bag. He wouldn’t be able to return to school until they held an  emergency supply of sweets. Because next time his sugar crashes, those sweets might just save his life. Hypoglycaemia is a known risk factor for death in diabetics.   Now engineers have invented an Implantable device that could save diabetes patients from that dangerously low blood sugar. ( https://ee.stanford.edu/siddharth-krishnans-implantable-device ) The device uses a  shape-memor...