I see headlines from time to time touting various ways to “reverse your diabetes” and “cure your diabetes once and for all.” I’m not of the “diabetes is a temporary situation” camp. For Type 2 diabetics, symptoms may subside and you may be able to get off your medications at some point (such as once you lose weight, or adjust your diet and exercise regimen), but your pancreas and insulin producing mechanics never function quite up to normal specs like they used to. Yes, I’m even talking to you Halle Berry and Drew Carey. For Type 1’s, let’s just face it, thinking you can wean yourself off of insulin is effective suicide.

Today’s #HAWMC blog post challenge asks health activists to focus on a “ludicrous headline or cure about your condition.” The intent seems to be for folks to share the ridiculous “cures” for our conditions, laugh, and write a lighthearted post about it. Instead, the more research I did for this post, the more angry I got.

We all dream of a cure, whether we have diabetes, cancer, or foot-in-mouth disorder, and someday there may very well be one. However, we will never be able to outsmart chronic stupidity. Too many people believe everything they read. If it’s on the internet, then it must be true, right? Wrong.

One of my favorite passages of all time is by Terry Goodkind from his book Wizard’s First Rule…

“People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”

We as people with diabetes and people with loved ones with diabetes, we all want a cure so bad that we will believe anything that anyone tells us in the off chance that maybe, by some long shot stroke of luck, it just might work. Remember being told when we were diagnosed that there would be a cure in ten years? I do, and that was 30 years ago.

Some would argue with my stance, but I believe that we will get much further in life by learning to live WITH our conditions, rather than fight acceptance of them. Don’t get it twisted, we should absolutely fight the disease or condition, but not our acceptance of it. With diabetes, we cannot possibly give it the attention it requires if we’re too busy living in denial that we have it.

Right now, today, there is no known cure for diabetes. Not for any type of diabetes. That is fact. But there are some amazing treatments, and modern medicine has come a long way in helping those of us with diabetes to live healthy, productive, and amazing lives with the disease. I overcome diabetes every single day, not because I’m cured, but because I refuse to let it overcome me.

Now excuse me while I go mainline cinnamon…