Diabetes and clinical laboratory tests: team medicine

The presentation at this symposium is from the following two perspectives: 1. Indispensability of team medicine for diabetes treatment: Once diabetes has been diagnosed, long-term treatment is essential. Diabetes is often due to a combination of unhealthy lifestyle factors, and treatment therefore requires patients to improve their lifestyles, a certain amount of stoicism also being needed. Patients also have to overcome events in their lives while suffering from diabetes, at the same time as controlling the diabetes, and such events cause stress for the patients, affecting them both psychologically and in terms of lifestyle, so patients' blood sugar levels are disturbed by interactions between stress and lifestyle factors. Medical personnel monitor the progression of numerous diabetic patients, and take different approaches to treatment on the basis of their experience and specialist knowledge. From various perspectives, maintenance of patients' will to continue with treatment is an important aspect of "team medicine". Enabling patients to be treated while feeling themselves to be supported by the treatment team is important, and is linked to empowerment of patients, which is the ultimate objective of the treatment guidelines. 2. Importance of team medicine, illustrated by diabetic nephropathy: If diabetic nephropathy progresses to Stage II or further, deterioration of the patient's condition is unavoidable. Medical personnel often think that the patients also will be concerned about the nephropathy, and will therefore not forget about having been told they have nephropathy. However, it has been found that, when subjective symptoms are absent, patients often do not fully understand the explanation, and forget about the nephropathy. It is therefore essential for medical personnel to appreciate that the risk of nephropathic progression is increased if patients do not remember about having nephropathy.