Why Test Blood Glucose?

When you have diabetes, your body can no longer keep your blood sugar in the normal range. That is the time your health care team - that is, your doctor, nurse, educator and yourself work out a diabetes care plan. This plan, essentially, is so set up that it helps you keep your blood glucose levels in your ideal range. Your plan may include a diet, regular exercise, insulin or diabetes pills. To know whether your plan is working well or not, you need to know your blood sugar levels. One of the best ways of keeping track of how well your plan is working is to test your blood glucose on a regular basis or "monitor your Blood Glucose".

You get many benefits from monitoring. It will help keep your blood sugar in control. Testing helps you find out what happens to your blood glucose levels when you eat certain kinds of foods, do certain exercises, or lose weight. Testing helps you find out what happens to your blood glucose level when you take insulin or diabetes pills, are sick or under stress.

A blood glucose test at home can help you decide how to take care of your diabetes. Tests may prompt you to take corrective action, should your blood glucose become too low or too high. If you use your monitoring results to make adjustments in your diabetes treatment programme to get your blood sugar under better control, you are less likely to develop long-term complications and thereby avoid the high costs of hospitalization and other form of treating the complications. The best plan is to use a monitoring system that detects high or low blood sugars long before symptoms of complications appear. That way, when high or low blood sugars do occur once in a while, you will be ready to adjust your food, exercise and medication to get things under control. Regular monitoring will help you get confidence that you are in control of your diabetes.

How to monitor your blood glucose

You monitor your blood glucose with a blood glucose monitoring system consisting of a blood glucose meter and test strips which give test results of the glucose level in your blood with just a drop of blood obtained from your finger tip. The drop of blood is obtained by pricking one of your fingers with a sterile LANCET, a special type of needle used only for this purpose with a spring activated device called a penlet. The drop of blood so obtained is then placed on a test strip in a blood glucose meter, which will then give a reading in less than a minute.

As for your home testing, the degree of accuracy that a good meter can provide should be close enough to professional results. It is important to follow the instructions that come with the product you buy. There are a number of blood glucose monitoring systems, such as the ONE TOUCH, SURESTEP, etc. that are available in the market.